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Hood Century and Limbo Accra reflect on a new Black spatial reality – Wallpaper*

Posted By on July 25, 2021

Hood Century and Limbo Accra reflect on a new Black spatial reality

In a new series of profiles, we follow Ghanaian spatial design studio Limbo Accra on a journey that explores its collaborations. Limbo Accras rich network developed through global partnerships that founder Dominique Petit-Frre nurtured with leading urban space-makers and architectural enthusiasts. The series discusses critical issues of our time, such as design intention, intergenerationality, creativity and change through Africa and its diaspora. First up, the spotlight turns to Jerald Coop Cooper of online platform Hood Century

Hood Century is an online platform founded by Jerald Coop Cooper in 2019. The project, blending Black culture and modernist architecture, was conceived as a space dedicated to documenting midcentury finds from Coops childhood neighbourhood in Cincinnati. In so doing, the platform soon became a springboard to unpack myriad themes, exploring the intersection between archive, education and activism in urban preservation.

Coop and Dominique Petit-Frre, founder of pioneering Ghana-based spatial practiceLimbo Accra, connected through their shared interest in the built environment and how it is experienced through the lens and perspective of Africa and its diaspora. The fruit of their collaboration takes form in a new architectural initiative gearing up to unfold in Accra at the end of the year.

As a Black person, Coop has often felt disillusoned when navigating design spaces. We love architecture and design, but we want to feel like we can participate, he says. Why is the dominant way of presenting [art] in a white gallery? What if Black art was never made for that space?

It is a point Petit-Frre can relate to: A lot of it wasnt. From my practice in Ghana, which focuses on activating incomplete architecture, I found that many of these works are structural units that need to take up space.

Church inCincinnati, OH. Photography: Hood Century

When it comes to penetrating architecture and design spaces, for Coop its all in the language. He maintains that a lack of access to the language surrounding design compounds over generations into an inherited design knowledge gap and radical change is needed to disrupt this cycle. Acting as an antidote, Hood Century, highlights the places where Black culture and modernist urban experiences intersect. When people intentionally travel to the sites that Coop has pinpointed, the community will activate itself, he says.

In this way, he not only documents design, but makes it accessible and endeavours to democratise it for communities both online and offline. The same ethos shapes this upcoming collaboration between him and Limbo Accra a shared investigation into midcentury sites in Africa, through a guide to must see architectural attractions. The collaboration will launch in Accra this December, with an exhibition and preservation initiative.

Shades of blue inGardena, CA. Photography: Hood Century

The documentation process that is so integral to Hood Century speaks to another passion of Coops the notion of the archive. It is the most important thing to a Black family, he explains, adding that by documenting the stories of our surroundings, we become active informants to future generations. My uncle took pictures of the same things that Im photographing, he says. Now, living in the same neighbourhood his father grew up in, Coop feels this sense of shared history through urban space in many ways: He used to shine shoes at the baseball stadium exactly where my studio is. I walk through, and feel his energy in the street.

Despite feeling recharged by this ancestral energy, Coop also speaks of a pain from infrastructural racism that people of his fathers generation faced, and many Black communities continue to face in light of rapid urban development. While the journey to unearthing these traumas is far from over, through Hood Century, Coop continues to encourage us to decolonise our minds, to challenge the language used in design and to ask ourselves:How do we tangibly document and cultivate design perspectives led by Africans and African diasporans, for future generations?

This question and more will continue to be explored in this new series of profiles by Wallpaper* and Limbo Accra. Watch this space.

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Hood Century and Limbo Accra reflect on a new Black spatial reality - Wallpaper*

What the Ben & Jerrys Decision Reveals About Israel – The Atlantic

Posted By on July 23, 2021

No company does progressive politics quite like Ben & Jerrys. The Vermont-based ice-cream maker has a reputation for corporate activism, owing to its support for a wide array of left-wing causes, including marriage equality, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. But when the company announced this week that it will no longer sell its products in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, it faced an outcome that every ice-cream maker fears most: a meltdown.

The matter of Israels settlements, which the international community regards as illegal under international law but which the Trump administration said will need to be resolved through a political and not a judicial process, has long been a thorny issue in Israel. (The Biden administration has yet to articulate its own policy on this.) When it comes to ice cream, though, the countrys notoriously fractious political sphere is virtually unanimous. Israels right-wing prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said that Ben & Jerrys has decided to brand itself as an anti-Israel ice cream. His centrist coalition partner, Yair Lapid, called the move a shameful surrender to anti-Semitism. Israeli President Isaac Herzog of the center-left, who once committed to removing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, called Ben & Jerrys decision to shun them a new kind of terrorism. The newly minted opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested that Israelis should boycott the brand. One centrist cabinet minister dutifully posted a TikTok of herself chucking a pint of what looked like Dulce de Leche into the trash.

That an ice-cream maker could cause such an uproar at the highest levels of Israeli politics says a lot about how sensitive Israel is to the very notion of boycotts against iteven those that, like Ben & Jerrys, are limited in scope. More fundamentally, the dustup reveals a growing divergence between how the world sees Israel and how the country sees itself. While the international community, including the United States, continues to distinguish between Israel and the territories it occupies, the reaction to the Ben & Jerrys decision has shown that, as far as many Israeli politicians are concerned, that distinction no longer exists.

On its face, Ben & Jerrys move to end its business in the occupied territories, which the company described as being inconsistent with its values, poses an arguably negligible problem for Israel from a practical standpointone that would affect, at most, the roughly 6 percent of the population living in one of the countrys sprawling settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both of which have been under Israeli control since 1967. Ben & Jerrys has said that it will continue to sell its products in Israel itself. Both Ben & Jerrys and its parent company, Unilever, declined to comment further, but the implications of the move are clear: While Israeli citizens living in settlements such as Ariel and Maale Adumim may no longer be able to buy Chunky Monkey in their local supermarket, they can find it nearby. (The same cannot be said for Palestinians in the West Bank, who are not afforded the same right to freedom of movement.)

In other words, Ben & Jerrys decision has no material impact on Israel whatsoever, Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israel-based pollster and political strategist, told me. But it does have a political oneand, to the Israelis who feel the need to defend their sovereignty, an existential one. By ending its business in the occupied territories, the company has effectively refused to profit from or legitimize the status quo in the region, a status quo that Israel is deeply invested in protecting. It has also made clear that it will recognize Israel only within its democratic borders. Its all symbolic, Scheindlin said, but symbolism is huge.

Why does Israel care about what an American ice-cream brand thinks of its policies? When I put this question to Scheindlin, she told me that for many Israelis, criticism of Israeli policy is often conflated with an existential threat to Israel itself. To hear many Israeli politicians tell it, criticism from abroad of our policies is anti-Israel, its anti-Zionist, and its anti-Jewish, or anti-Semitic, Scheindlin said. And thats really the narrative that weve been hearing. There is also the fear that what started with Ben & Jerrys might not end there; once one company boycotts Israeli settlements, whats to stop others from joining it?

Not all Israelis subscribe to this view, of course. Those on the left, including members of the Meretz Party, have defended Ben & Jerrys. But these voices have largely been drowned out by the uproar of the majority.

Read: Why an effort to thwart some boycotts of Israel fails the free-speech test

Not doing business in the settlements isnt a new concept. Indeed, much of the Zionist leftincluding Meretz, the left-wing advocacy group Peace Now, and the prominent American Jewish commentator Peter Beinarthave advocated settlement boycotts for years. Activists within the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls on countries and organizations to sever financial ties with Israel as a means of applying economic and political pressure on the country to end its occupation, have been doing so for even longer. (Unlike BDS, which targets Israel writ large, Ben & Jerrys decision was limited in scopea distinction that meant little to the Israeli and U.S. officials who erroneously conflated them. Although the BDS movement welcomed the news, it would have preferred that Ben & Jerrys end its operations in all of Israel, not just the occupied territories.)

Relatively few international corporations have actually followed through with the BDS call, however, which is why when one as high-profile as Ben & Jerrys finally did, following pressure from pro-Palestinian activists, it led to such an uproar. (A notable exception is McDonalds Israel, whose chief executive, Omri Paden, an Israeli citizen and a founding member of Peace Now, refused to open any branches in the West Bank.) But Israels reaction speaks to more than just its particular sensitivity to outside criticism. Not long ago, Israeli politicians would openly say that the countrys settlement policy threatened its long-term security, as well as its prospects for peace with its neighbors. But under the leadership of the countrys recently deposed prime minister, Netanyahu, those voices became quieter as the Israeli government went to great lengths to normalize the occupation and expand the countrys settlement enterprise.

Netanyahu is no longer in power, but the fact that lawmakers across the political spectrum are united on this issue is a feat in itself, given the fractious nature of Israeli politics. It really is very much a reflection that the Israeli consensus is that there is no green line, there is no occupation, there is no occupied territory, Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel and Palestine at the International Crisis Group, told me. Theres just one big lump of land that is under Israeli sovereignty, and not doing business in any part of it is somehow anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.

Read: A new word is defining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Washington

Regardless of whether Ben & Jerrys sticks with its decision (or whether it succumbs to pressure to reverse course, as has happened with other companies), it has already revealed the extent to which Israeli leaders across the political spectrum support the de facto, if not de jure, annexation of the occupied territories by Israel. Despite Israels new government of change, much remains fundamentally the same.

The right to the left all kind of agree that the facts on the ground are what they are, Zonszein said, and theyre not planning on changing.

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What the Ben & Jerrys Decision Reveals About Israel - The Atlantic

July 22: A Pivotal Day in Terrorism History – War on the Rocks

Posted By on July 23, 2021

Seventy-five years ago today, at approximately 11:45 a.m. on July 22, 1946, a stolen delivery truck pulled up to the basement service entrance at the front of Jerusalems King David Hotel. Five terrorists from the Irgun Zvai Leumi a Jewish underground organization commonly known as the Irgun exited the vehicle and, disguised as Arab workers, carried seven large milk churns into La Regence, the hotels chic nightclub located in the basement. Each churn contained approximately 50 pounds of high explosive. Fifty-two minutes later the bombs detonated, killing 91 people and injuring 45.

In Norway, on this date 10 years ago, white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a vehicle bomb under Oslos government quarter, killing eight. He then proceeded to open fire at nearby Utya island, home to the Norwegian Labour Party youth wings summer camp, where he killed 69 people most of them children at short range. Before his attack, Breivik had released a 1,518-page manifesto, railing against multiculturalists and cultural Marxists.

Both the King David Hotel bombing and Breiviks attacks had profound global repercussions. The former helped convince Britain to leave Mandatory Palestine and sparked a new era of publicized terrorism, while the latter played a pioneering role in ushering in an international wave of far-right terrorism. This July 22, accordingly, provides an important reminder of the enduring impact of terrorism and the threat it poses, not just to civilians, but to societal stability and the political status quo. Governments should continue to prioritize counter-terrorism and remain prepared to enact measured responses to acts of political violence.

The King David Hotel Bombing and the Internationalization of Terrorism

Although Menachem Begin commander of the Irgun and a future Israeli prime minister would repeatedly claim that warnings were given to evacuate the King David Hotel, questions remain to this day whether they were ignored or never communicated to the proper authority. The Irguns attack has always been controversial because the facility was not an ordinary hotel, but served as the nerve center of Britains administration of Palestine. It housed Britains military headquarters and government secretariat in the territory, as well as the local offices of Britains intelligence and security services.

Begin made daring and dramatic acts of violence an integral and innovative part of the Irguns strategy. The goal was to attract international attention to Palestine and thereby publicize simultaneously the Zionists grievances against Britain and their claims for statehood. In an era long before the advent of 24-hour cable news and instantaneous satellite-transmitted broadcasts, the Irgun thus deliberately sought to appeal to a global audience far beyond the immediate confines of the local struggle, beyond even the ruling regimes own homeland. Like its nonviolent and less violent Zionist counterparts, the group sought to generate sympathy and marshal support among powerful allies such as the American Jewish community, U.S. representatives and senators, White House officials, as well as among delegates to the fledgling United Nations Organization. In this way, pressure would be applied on the British government to leave Palestine and allow the establishment of a Jewish state there.

The articulation of Begins strategy in his book The Revolt, first published in English in 1951, thus represented an important milestone in the evolution and internationalization of terrorism. Begins example appears to have resonated with other peoples struggling against Western colonial domination and continued occupation of their lands in the decade following World War II. The leader of the anti-British guerrilla campaign in Cyprus, Gen. George Grivas, adopted an identical strategy. The internationalization of Palestinian Arab terrorism that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s also consciously emulated the quest for international attention and recognition that the Irguns own terrorist campaign pioneered a quarter of a century earlier: It was a model that the Palestine Liberation Organization often cited.

The Brazilian revolutionary theorist Carlos Marighellas famous Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, which was essential reading for various left-wing terrorist organizations that arose both in Latin America and Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, similarly embraced Begins strategy of provoking the security forces in hopes of alienating the population from the authorities. Whether Marighella had ever consulted or read The Revolt is not known. What is indisputable is that he advocated the same strategy that the Irgun had pioneered over two decades before.

More recently, when U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they found a copy of The Revolt, along with other books about the Jewish struggle and the Irguns transformation from terrorist group pariah to a respectable political party, in the well-stocked library that al-Qaeda maintained at one of its training facilities in that country.

Anders Behring Breiviks Attacks and the Threat of White Supremacist Violence

Breivik, like Begin, sought an international audience. The manifesto he released prior to the attacks was written in English, and he openly termed his attack a marketing operation, designed to draw attention to his manifesto and the ideology it laid out. He also aimed to use his trial as a stage to the world he pled not guilty on account of self-defense, and sought to spread his views through the cameras gathered in the courtroom. He was convicted and sentenced to an extendable 21 years in prison Norways maximum sentence.

Breiviks assault marked the opening salvo in what would become a tsunami of far-right terrorism stretching from Christchurch in New Zealand to Pittsburgh and El Paso in the United States. Breiviks template, including his release of a manifesto and his targeting of multiple locations, has become a model emulated by far-right terrorists across borders and oceans, and he has been canonized as a saint among the far-right online fringe a badge of dishonor he shares with multiple other white supremacist killers. The deadliest far-right terrorist since Breivik, Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant, described Knight Justiciar Breivik as his true inspiration.

In Germany, another July 22 terrorist anniversary provides testament to Breiviks impact: In 2016, a far-right gunman who had featured Breivik in social media profile pictures opened fire in Munich, killing nine. The Bavarian Ministry of the Interior surmised, We can only assume, that [the gunman] purposefully selected the date.

The Counter-Terrorism Challenge: Preventing and Responding to Black Swan Events

The lasting legacies of the King David Hotel bombing and Breiviks attacks are due largely to their combination of death toll and marketing. Both were extremely deadly and both, quite deliberately, captured the worlds attention, in turn publicizing the attackers grievances and radicalizing others to the cause. But there was little else that would have helped us to predict why these two events had such immediate as well as long-lasting impacts.

Both represented black swan events, which are marked by their rarity, impact, and efforts to retrospectively explain them. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb who coined the term explains, A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

Some acts of terrorism fade into history, scarcely remembered outside the families of the victims others change the world. The bombing of the King David Hotel and Breiviks assault on Norway did the latter, catalyzing political upheavals and sparking new global trends. Both are important reminders that terrorism will always possess a powerful agenda-setting function and outsized capacity to drive political change. But, perhaps more concerningly, both are evidence that one never truly knows which terrorist incidents will spark the most long-lasting ramifications.

Counter-terrorism, accordingly, is not just a mission to save lives, but is essential to protecting political stability and societal predictability. This is why, at a time when many in America and elsewhere are anxious to close the book on the Global War on Terror, the need for continued vigilance remains vital. New challenges have arisen as older ones abate, and effectively countering terrorism will continue to be a preeminent concern of both domestic as well as international security in the 21st century. After the myriad intelligence failures of the past two decades, strengthening and improving the analytical and predictive capabilities of those agencies and departments charged with our protection will be critical. Better anticipating over-the-horizon threats and managing their outcomes can mitigate the black swan phenomenon that is terrorists stock and trade.

Terrorism analysts enjoy debating the question of whether terrorism is an existential threat. On its own, it is not. Instead, terrorisms impact is defined by the response of governments and citizens. Terrorism has prevailed in the past, but not because terrorists vanquished their foes with car bombs or assassinations, scholars Walter Laqueur and Christopher Wall write. They succeeded when government overreacted or when there was not a government to react, making a terrorist group the entity best positioned to govern and impose laws. In an ironic twist, less immediately damaging attacks than 9/11, including the Oslo attacks of July 22, 2011, may pose greater long-term threats to Western liberal democracy they force domestic audiences to pick sides, complicating cooperation and a nuanced government response, and slowly corroding democracies from within. Maintaining national cohesiveness when confronting individuals who seek to divide societies a goal that in a post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 world has become increasingly difficult is thus particularly vital.

Terrorists have always aspired to change the course of history. And through their calculated acts of violence they seek to have an asymmetrical, disproportionate impact on world events, government policies, and societal peace of mind. Both the bombing of the King David Hotel and Breiviks twin attacks upset the status quo and compelled the targeted governments to rethink their policies. In the Irguns case, the bombing contributed to the complex chain of events that 14 months later led the British government to announce that it was leaving Palestine and to wash its hands of attempting to navigate between Arab and Jewish claims for independence. The attack also sent a powerful message to aggrieved peoples elsewhere that terrorism could influence moribund Western colonial overlords in hitherto unimaginable ways. The Norwegian governments response to Breiviks attacks was far more measured: It implemented targeted changes across several ministries to better address the threat of white supremacist violence, and has avoided major follow-on incidents in the decade since.

Moreover, whereas the King David Hotel bombing marked the beginning of the end of British rule over Palestine and the failure of its security forces to contain, much less defeat, the terrorists, Breiviks attacks highlighted the need for a more comprehensive and holistic approach to counter-terrorism. That type of approach should view threats as more polymorphous than monolithic, and not specific to one region or religion. The fundamental message of both attacks is that effective counter-terrorism requires long-term engagement, patience, national and international unity against extremism, and a commitment to never react to single incidents with an emotional rather than a measured response. Counter-terrorism will thrive when governments and citizens think proactively rather than reactively about societal weaknesses and shortcomings, and do so together.

Counter-terrorism also remains an essential national security priority: The anniversary of the King David Hotel bombing and Breiviks attacks demonstrates the power of even less remembered terrorist acts to create profound and lasting effects.

Bruce Hoffman is the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counter-terrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.

Jacob Ware is a research associate for counter-terrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Image: Imperial War Museum

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July 22: A Pivotal Day in Terrorism History - War on the Rocks

This is America: Everybody has a connection to the Surfside collapse – USA TODAY

Posted By on July 23, 2021

My dad always reminds me nobody is a prophet in their own land.

Come to think of it, he might actually be an authority figure on the matter like every other member of my family. Despite having been born in different corners of the world, by the time my parents and grandparents were my age, they had abandoned their homelands.

My maternal grandparents were Basque survivors of the Spanish Civil War. As a young child, my grandfather was sent away to an orphanage in France as his older siblings stayed back to fight Gen. Francisco Franco who had overthrown the government. My paternal grandparents were first-generation Cubans, their parentshad made their way to the Caribbean island sometime after World War I.

My mother was born in Spain but raised in Venezuela. My father isa Sephardic "Jewban" and formerpolitical prisoner. By 1979, he was twice exiled, once to Europe and subsequently the United States.

I'm Romina Ruiz-Goiriena (yes, that's a mouthful), a national correspondent at USA TODAY.

As the child and grandchild of immigrants, I didn't inherit silver heirlooms.Instead, I grew up with a special virtue of freedomthat's something you can pack in a suitcase. Writer Adam Gopnik describes this gift as one that wont make you richer and more powerful, but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive. Or rather: with a certain responsibility because I had survived.

But like many other "so-called"Miami natives, it wasn't something we chose or a random geographic occurrence. Everyone's life here began as a result of different seismic political events that shaped the last 100 years.

When they got here, Miami was still nascent;a lot younger than other U.S. cities, born of a major railroad expansion project. It also waspart of the Jim Crow South where Black and Jewish residents (and later Cubans) were on the receiving end of segregationist practices, economic displacement and systemic oppression. Its location on the map also helped shape its destiny: It has been on the receiving end of large regional burdens such as drug trafficking, immigration, natural disastersand endemic poverty. Against these conditions, the city grew. I did too.

I left Miami after high school.Abroad, I became a journalist spending over a decade working in all areas of news: agency wires, newspaper, TV and web. I went on to tell stories from France, Israel and Latin America, primarily about everyday people facing extraordinary challenges. I didn't parachute in; I lived in these countries, became part of these communities, sometimes found long-lost relatives and learned a language along the way gaining an intimate perspective on the stories I was telling. Some places, Israel, Cuba and Paris felt more like home, or pieces of it when you're like me, no one place is ever home. Others, like Guatemala and Central America were completely new. Reporting ona failed drug war, migration, trafficking and genocide, first for the Associated Press and later CNNchanged how I approached reporting.

And like a good prodigal daughter, I eventually returned to the Magic City's straits.

Fast forward to June 24 at 1:30 a.m. when part of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, collapsed, killing at least 97 people as they slept soundly in their beds.

Images of the pancaked building sent chills around the world. By 6:30 a.m. one of our editors was calling. I knew this couldn't be good.

"There's been a building collapse in Surfside, how far are you?," she asked.

"It's about 40 minutes according to Waze, 25 if I do my Miami thing,"I told her as I tied my sneakers, poured black coffee in a mug, grabbed battery packs and headed for my car. My breaking news adrenaline training kicked in.

The editor read me in as I was driving on I-95. I started making calls to municipal sources, and learned there was a reunification center for families about 10 blocks north of the towers. I texted some friends to see if I could park my car in their garage knowing all-too-well the police were going to cordon off the perimeter. I walked right past every single officer until I was right on Collins Avenue standing in front of the horrific site. Right away I looked for survivors, onlookers, officers, neighbors there's definitely an M.O. to covering any disaster that I knew from my earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and living through suicide bombings and war.

It was when I got to the makeshift family reunification site at the Surfside Community Center that I realized this was unlike any other event I had ever covered.

Crowds of people moved from one side to the other. Some children were sleeping on gym mats. I heard hints of Spanish with a thick Argentine accent. I heard Venezuelans, Colombiansand Cubans. Others spoke Haitian Creole.

Members from the orthodox synagogue up the street were setting up tables with coffee, juice, a kosher breakfast spread with fruit and bagels for everyone. Aside from county police officers,EMTs fromHatzalah, an Israeli volunteer-based organization were on site tending to families going into shock. Some wore a kippahand tzitzit,ritual fringes.

Press wasn't allowed in, but I blended in.

"Bo bevakasha," come here please I hear in Hebrew. I look up and see the Israeli ConsulMaor Elbaz-Starinsky.

"Slicha, ani kotevet mi USA TODAY, I'm a reporter from USA TODAY," I said as I lunged at him to ask if there were any Israelis missing and if the country would send rescue teams to Miami.

I filed my mini feed on my cellphone and sent it off.

I spent the day interviewing survivors, family members and others who too were displaced.Those who were willing to talk told me their life story, sometimes sharing other traumas.

I spoke with Moshe Candiotti, a 67-year-old collapse survivor who was a soldier during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel and told me about how the sounds that night took him back to the Sinai Desert.A mother waiting for news of her missing son told me she was in Buenos Aires during the AMIA bombing in 1994, when a suicide bomber drove a vanbomb into the Jewish community center killing 85 people.

Everywhere I turned I found people that I intuitively somehow knew. Or rather, knew their home country, understood their history, and could speak to them in their mother tongue. Each person I encountered, there was a backstory about something I had learned as part of being a reporter in the Middle East and Latin America. There was also a geist, a je ne sais quoi of accumulated experiences that comes with that perennial nostalgia you can never shake off as the child of immigrants, as a Jew,as a reporter especially one of color.

And that was before I too realized I had connections to the building.My dad told me one of the survivors, Ileana Monteagudo, dated my uncle back in Cuba. Her brother served time in political prison with my dad. The Kleiman family that perished had deep roots in Havana's Jewish community before leaving to Puerto Rico after Fidel Castro's revolution. Three of the victims were all recent graduates of Venezuela's Colegio Moral y Luces Herzl-Bialik founded by my friend's grandparents in Caracas.

As beautifully chronicled by the Miami Herald's Linda Robertson, everybody in Miami knew somebody from that building; "inside the 'condo of the abuelas,'a walk down any hallway was a feast for the senses. The smells of frying plantains, baking challah bread and roasting brisket mingled with the sounds of Willy Chirinos salsa hits and telenovela actors operatic dialogue."

What would otherwise have been a hyperlocal story had heartstrings to all of my adopted hometowns. It allowed me to navigate each account with deep empathy and respect; any of them could have been my cousins, grandparents, tos and tas. But it also sowed the seeds to accountability stories and exclusives ahead of other national outlets.

When people trust you with their feelings, they can trust you with their documents. The best stories go after the truth as evenly-handed as they show empathy.

It's why I'll never forget Pablo Rodriguez, 40, who lost his mother and grandmother in the collapse. It was the worst day of his life and yet he chose to talk to us.

He too is a Miami native, from Westchester, a neighborhood in southwest Miami-Dade County. We bonded over the small movie theater that was the talk of the town when it opened up in the '90s, baseball and our abuelas.

I told him my 92-year-old grandmother had passed away in May. When I asked him what he'd miss most he said her black beans, nobody makes frijoles negros like she does, he said.

I totally got what he meant. I had spent all of COVID-19 promising my grandmother I'd come over for her infamous chicharos or Cuban split-pea soup, after I got the vaccine but didn't make it in time.

He told me his grandmother, Elena Chvez, wouldalways show up with a freshlycooked batch of beans. That's when I knew to ask if he had some and where she stored them. If she was a Cuban grandmother there was no way they'd be stored in a fancy Tupperware container. I wanted that detail in the story.

He let out a laugh amid the sea of tears, "qu tupper ni qutupper,what tupperware?"

That's when he told me, there was still a plastic margarine tub in his fridge with the last beans she cooked for her beloved grandson.

Follow Romina Ruiz-Goiriena on Twitter: @RominaAdi

--

This is America is a weekly take on current events from a rotating panel of USA TODAY Network journalists with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. If you're seeing this newsletter online or someone forwarded it to you,you can subscribehere. If you have feedback for us, we'd love for you todrop it here.

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This is America: Everybody has a connection to the Surfside collapse - USA TODAY

Okra recipes to try that go beyond its slimy reputation – Los Angeles Times

Posted By on July 23, 2021

When I mentioned recently to a friend that I was developing some recipes highlighting okra, he forced a polite smile and said, Well, theres a lot there to work with. Sensing his distaste, I assured him the recipes would be worth it.

I often find myself trying to convince people that a food they say they dont like is actually great, but okra may be the steepest hill to climb. Typically, you either love okra or you hate it either you dont mind the slime or it repulses you. That sliminess a survival mechanism that helps the plant store water is also present in cactus and purslane, as anyone whos cooked with those ingredients is familiar.

Fortunately, in my home, its all love. My partner and I eat okra often and with gusto, working it into lots of dishes in place of the more basic healthful dinner representatives, green beans and broccoli. And though you find it in grocery stores throughout the year, the vegetable always screams summer to me because its in season from July through September.

Its a vegetable that deserves a spotlight rather than its reputation as the slimy thing that thickens gumbo. While that Cajun dish may be the only reason okra is known to most people in the U.S., the vegetables uses globally are almost too many to count.

I paged through more than two dozen cookbooks to get the full story of how okra is treated around the world so I can be armed with resources to convert the haters. I found many common themes for dealing with its slime, both in terms of getting rid of it and in terms of using it to the cooks advantage.

In My Bombay Kitchen, Niloufar King sauts okra with green chiles, garlic and ginger and uses it as a base for eggs, a Parsi specialty. In The Food of Morocco, Paula Wolfert documents a recipe for marak of okra and tomatoes, a melange of the pods and fresh tomatoes mixed with paprika and garlic.

Okra roasts up crisp and sweet to counterbalance a base of aromatic spiced labneh.

(Silvia Razgova/For The Times)

In Senegal, chef Pierre Thiam boils it with sorrel to make a green sauce for stewed meat, a common dish in other parts of West Africa as well. Indeed, in The Africa Cookbook, Jessica B. Harris chronicles its use from Senegal and Benin in the west to Ethiopia in the east, where it most likely originated. In Sub-Saharan Africa, okra is known with various similar spellings as gombo in many of the languages spoken there, linking the vegetables use in the stews of the region to those of the American South, where it migrated along the slave-trade route.

But perhaps no region of the world seemingly takes to okra more than the Middle East. From Turkey to Iran and everywhere in between, the vegetable is cherished for its flavor and thickening power. In the Turkish village of Konya, it is dried on strings in summer to use in winter for soups. In The Turkish Cookbook, Musa Dagdeviren makes sour okra, stewed in tomatoes with lemon juice. This tradition is also documented in Feast: Food of the Islamic World by Anissa Helou, where she simmers the dried okra with tomatoes and lamb for a stew from Konya.

(Silvia Razgova/For The Times)

In Food of Life, Najmieh Batmanglij stews it with lamb, tomatoes, green chiles and turmeric and then finishes it off with lime juice and grape molasses in a khoresh, or Iranian stew. In the Persian Gulf version of that same dish from her second book, Cooking in Iran, potatoes are added, and the sweet-and-sour final flavorings come from tamarind paste and date molasses. It seems okra pairs well with just about any flavor on earth.

In The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden includes a recipe for an Egyptian preparation of sauted okra perfumed with a garlic-coriander paste fried in olive oil, while Harris book recounts another Egyptian recipe for sweet and sour okra in which the pod is cooked with lemon juice and honey.

A quick blistering in hot oil gives okra a deep umami flavor to blend with aromatic stir-fried corn.

(Silvia Razgova/For The Times)

One of my favorite dishes I encountered came from Sephardic Flavors: Jewish Cooking of the Mediterranean by Joyce Goldstein, who soaks okra pods in vinegar water for 20 minutes to strip them of their slipperiness. She then braises the okra with chicken in a dish called pollo kon bamiya, made with red wine and pinches of cinnamon and cloves.

I found the vinegar trick more amusing than useful, since I couldnt find proof anywhere else that it worked. But its use echoed sentiments throughout all the recipes I came across in which okra is cooked with acidic ingredients, most often tomatoes, because the acid seems to minimize the strength of the slime.

Armed with these techniques, I set about developing some new okra recipes that highlight the beauty of the vegetable in all its versatility, both in complementary flavors and techniques. To use its thickening abilities to my advantage, I riff off Goldsteins chicken dish and braise rendered chicken pieces and okra in a tomato paste-enriched broth, flavored with olives and caramelized lemon to help tame some of the slime.

Okra thickens a caramelized lemon broth for browned chicken in this braise spiked with olives.

(Silvia Razgova/For The Times)

For those who want all the slime gone, I have two options: My roast okra dish rubs the cut pods with spices, salt and sugar and then blasts them at high heat in the oven until all the slime is driven out of the pods and into the spices to hydrate them. Theyre then served over a bed of creamy labneh spiced with chiles, ginger, garlic and spicy, golden turmeric.

And my okra stir-fry rids the pods of their slime by frying them in oil until blistered and caramelized before tossing them with sweet fresh corn and aromatics like garlic, scallions and chiles that accentuate the savoriness of the vegetable.

Though I may not win over die-hard okra haters with these recipes, my plan is to at least show them what theyre missing. Theres more to the pod than the slime, and okra is a vegetable that adapts to almost any flavors you throw at it and any way you want to cook it. That versatility alone is evidence of why it has endured for so long despite its sticky reputation.

Get the recipes:

Time 45 minutes

Yields Serves 4 to 6

Time 50 minutes

Yields Serves 4 to 6

Time 25 minutes

Yields Serves 2

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Okra recipes to try that go beyond its slimy reputation - Los Angeles Times

Why SF is home to the world’s oldest Jewish film fest J. – The Jewish News of Northern California

Posted By on July 23, 2021

Just a few years ago, at a gathering of filmmakers during the annual Berlin Film Festival, I was asked by a perplexed newcomer to the festival scene why the oldest and largest Jewish film festival in the world took place in, of all places, San Francisco.

As a native-born, fourth-generation San Francisco Jew and a former executive director of the now 41-year-old San Francisco Jewish Film Festival running this year from July 22 through Aug. 1, mostly online but with two days at the Castro Theatre I was tempted to reply, in very Jewish fashion, And why shouldnt it be in San Francisco?

But I had to admit: Its a very good question. After all, with its long history of assimilation, the Bay Areas Jewish population is conventionally held up as the poster child of fragmenting Jewish identity, boasting among the highest rates of interfaith households in the country.

So it seems counterintuitive that San Francisco would be the birthplace of what we can now see as a worldwide Jewish cultural movement: the Jewish film festival.

But indeed, in 1980, a young filmmaker and activist named Deborah Kaufman organized the first such event in the world naming it simply the Jewish Film Festival and presented 10 films in a small theater in the Mission District.

It captured a zeitgeist, and the festival has continued to be produced without interruption (a 2020 streaming festival during Covid notwithstanding) for four decades, now attracting some 40,000 attendees each summer for screenings of dozens of films from across the globe that address, and question, the Jewish experience.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival sparked an explosion of Jewish film festivals in nearly every community and country where Jews can be found.

So why San Francisco? In fact, the very same diverse, assimilated and questioning nature of San Francisco as both a cultural nexus and a Jewish community provided the necessary ingredients that gave rise to the festival in the first place, and which continue to form the essence of its position today as a leader in the field of identity-based media.

Kaufman came of age in the Bay Area in the 1960s and early 1970s at a time when radical political activism and ethnic solidarity movements were shaping the lives of a generation of students on Bay Area campuses.

At San Francisco State University, student protests in 1968 had led to the formation of the nations first freestanding College of Ethnic Studies, while the ongoing anti-Vietnam and civil rights activism at UC Berkeley forever linked the fates of its sizable African American, Latino, Asian American and Jewish student populations.

At the same time, a new generation of Bay Area filmmakers, rejecting the commercial emphasis of Los Angeles, were establishing film collectives, art houses and alternative media outlets in the Bay Area to support a new wave of politically engaged filmmaking. Young artists were discovering the power of media especially documentaries to express new ideas about what it means to be a minority in America.

These young and emboldened communities of artists and activists started to show their films to one another as a way of not only sharing their work, but finding and building a sense of community.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival sparked an explosion of Jewish film festivals in nearly every community and country where Jews can be found.

The identity-based or culturally specific film festival was born out of this atmosphere as a social, political and cultural phenomenon: a self-defining, self-reflecting incubator for newly conscious constituencies.

Thus it is no coincidence that the very first gay film festival took place in San Francisco in 1977, followed in quick succession by Jewish, Asian American, Latino, womens film festivals and many more most of them the first, or at least among the first, of their kind.

In the case of the Jewish Film Festival, however, there was another important dimension that defined the mission.

As Kaufman would come to describe it, the Jewish Film Festival was started as an intervention.

Kaufman, joined in the second year by Janis Plotkin (between them, they led the SFJFF for its first 22 years), did not see reflected in traditional American Jewish life, or in Hollywoods stereotyped depiction of Jews, the diversity and complexity that they felt defined their generations dynamic Jewish identity.

Since the end of World War II, American Jewish life had largely been defined by the twin poles of the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel; but in San Francisco, the large population of unaffiliated and to some degree marginalized young Jews did not see their political concerns or even themselves reflected in American Jewish institutions, media outlets or synagogues.

The Jewish Film Festival was established first of all as a cultural corrective: presenting a range of imagery including films about the Sephardic and Mizrahi experience, about relationships between Blacks and Jews, about feminist Jews, gay Jews and Jews of color, films that addressed Israels relationship with its Palestinian neighbors, and films that focused on stories of Jewish resistance and activism during the Holocaust, beyond victimization in other words, films that presented counternarratives to prevailing and often sacred points of view.

The electricity generated by this intervention, and the joy it seemed to bring to generations of outsider Jews who finally were finding themselves on the screen and in the audience, became the great defining strength of the festival, and its numbers and influence grew.

The SFJFFs directors, staff and volunteers began helping other communities build similar festivals (not always with the same sense of activism, which was in some ways unique to San Francisco), even publishing a tip sheet for starting your own film festival (Jewish or otherwise), and later a book-length guide to independent Jewish film a function now served by a robust online archive.

In the SFJFFs first decade, its organizers began raising enough money to travel annually to the Berlin Film Festival, bringing new Jewish voices from across Europe and the Middle East back to hungry Bay Area audiences.

At home, the festival grew to screen in four locations, eventually adding year-round screenings, a winter festival, a distribution arm, a youth filmmaking program, and becoming itself an important training ground and informal film market for the growing field of independent Jewish film.

A standout event in which the SFJFF proved its role as a powerful cultural intervention came in 1990, when it organized a groundbreaking festival in Moscow, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing some 60,000 participants and overcoming tremendous logistical and political obstacles, the Moscow festival became the single largest Jewish cultural gathering in the history of the Soviet Union.

But the SFJFFs cultural activism often met with mainstream Jewish resistance at home: the Moscow festival was opposed by groups supporting the rescue of Soviet Jews, while two years earlier, the festival faced outrage and funding cuts when it invited Palestinian peace activist Mubarak Awad to participate in a post-film panel in San Francisco.

In fact, over the four decades of the festival, one can practically chart the rise and fall of American Jewish anxiety, especially around the Israel-Palestine conflict, by measuring the ferocity of criticism lobbed at the festivals programming choices.

In the mid-1990s, in the rosy optimism of the Oslo Accord, the festival presented films celebrating the overlap of Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi and Mizrahi cultures, showcased films made by Palestinians and enjoyed community collaborations with the Bay Areas Arab Film Festival.

These programs were generally greeted warmly (if sometimes warily) and rarely drew significant opposition.

During my own eight-year tenure at the festival, which happened to coincide with the second Intifada, Israels 2006 Lebanon War and increasing concerns about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on American campuses, the vehemence of criticism from Jewish conservatives amplified into outright culture wars across the country, targeting Jewish theater companies, museums, Jewish community centers and, specifically, the SFJFF.

These cultural presenters were increasingly pressured to retreat from offering programs and speakers perceived as divisive to Jewish solidarity or overly critical of Israel.

Ironically, this backlash was happening amid an unprecedented flowering of Israels film industry, whose powerful dramas (often dark) and sophisticated documentaries (often highly critical of Israels status quo) were forming an important piece of SFJFFs annual program.These tumultuous tides intersected in 2009 at SFJFFs screening of an Israeli documentary about the American anti-occupation activist Rachel Corrie, and the festivals invitation to her mother to engage in a Q&A after the film.

The event erupted into months-long angry calls for boycotting the festival and eliminating its funding, and counter-demonstrations supporting the principles of open debate in Jewish life a controversy that went viral in new waves of social media outrage.

But even though the fault lines in the Israel-Palestine conflict will likely continue to be reflected in community response to festival programs, its important to point out how far we have come in the 41 years of SFJFF, in widening the notion of what a Jewish film is and what a festival can mean for community cohesion.

A look at most Jewish film festival websites and catalogs among the hundreds across the world, from Hong Kong to Warsaw to Melbourne will uncover films celebrating an extraordinary range of Jewish expression, from hip-hop and tattoo artists to world-class Israeli chefs; you will find Orthodox dramas, Mexican rom-coms, lesbian comedies, Bollywood musicals and film school horror flicks that reflect surprising aspects of worldwide Jewish identities.

No longer can it be said, as the founding generation once lamented, that we cant find ourselves on the screen.

It is in no small part a credit to the visionaries who began, supported and sustained the SFJFF 41 years ago that the Jewish film festival today is a global cultural phenomenon. And thanks to them, looking back, we can say, of course it started in San Francisco.

Continued here:

Why SF is home to the world's oldest Jewish film fest J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

Too often, Holocaust education often blurs fact and fiction – Chalkbeat Colorado

Posted By on July 23, 2021

Hey, I did have one question That was the tentative opening to an email I recently received from a high school teacher. The Ninth Candle, the Holocaust education organization I founded, had led some educational programs for her students, and the teacher and I had been trading emails for a few weeks since. Even teachers at schools with established Holocaust programs can be reluctant to get too close to the big questions about it. I sense a widespread but unspoken fear of being called insensitive or offensive or worse, antisemitic. She only asked me her one question after a relationship had begun to form and after she had my repeated reassurance that nothing was off the table.

And the question?

She wanted to know if the Nazis had used human fat, rendered from Jewish prisoners, to make bars of soap. The class materials shed been given said they had. She doubted it but was too afraid to challenge it. The answer is no, they didnt. Despite the teachers apprehension, it was perfectly reasonable to ask.

This teacher shared more of her class materials with me as our exchange went on. Along with the soap myth, which academics are still untangling, there was a mess of small but significant factual errors: chronology, place names, victim numbers. We soon realized that Holocaust education at her school, like at many schools across the country, needed to be overhauled. A recent study revealed that our knowledge of the Holocaust is declining. Most millennials and Gen Z members surveyed dont know that 6 million Jews were murdered during the genocide, and half of those surveyed cant name a single concentration camp or ghetto. Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents are surging.

One of the first things we can do to improve the situation is to uproot myths from our curriculums. This will involve discussing all those difficult questions. We also need to keep class materials updated because our knowledge of the Holocaust is still evolving. (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a good source for teachers who want to make sure their lessons are up to date.)

Take the soap myth. Rumors that the Nazis made soap from Jewish prisoners emerged before the war was over. Evidence to support them was presented at the Nuremberg Trials. In the 1980s, historians discovered that the issue was more complex than first realized, and their investigations continued into the 21st century. We now know that the Danzig Anatomical Institutes preparation of corpses made a soapy by-product used to clean the institute during the final months of the war. The corpses werent Jewish, and no bars of soap were ever made. But Allied and Soviet propaganda, and pop culture works like Zofia Nalkowskas 1946 book Medallions inflated the institutes disrespect for the dead into something even worse. There are many other examples of our knowledge of the Holocaust improving over time. But such changes dont always make it into curriculums and schools.

This is partly due to Holocaust educations dependence on pop culture, with its liberal use of works that deliberately blur fact and fiction. Schools common choices include books and movies like Schindlers List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. But these works arent useful teaching tools. They treat the Holocaust as a game of cat-and-mouse, Jews as an interchangeable mass who went to their deaths unthinkingly, and survival as a matter of attitude. In addition, there are now so many advocacy groups putting free, one-size-fits-all Holocaust lesson plans on the internet that some schools and teachers barely know where to begin.

For students, pop cultures repetitive, two-dimensional treatment of the Holocaust makes it difficult to think about it critically, or to feel empathy for its victims, or to connect it with the present especially if thats where ones Holocaust education begins and ends. (More than 30 U.S. states still have no mandate that the Holocaust be taught at all.) Folding more cases of resistance into Holocaust curriculums is one way to address this. Ive seen students relationships with the subject change when light is cast on the uprisings in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka, or on resisters like Alexander Pechersky and Zivia Lubetkin.

Another way is to study the Holocaust alongside Nazi Germanys forgotten victims, as the historian Richard J. Evans calls them: the Roma and Sinti peoples, gay people, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Slavs, among others. Students often connect with books that reach imaginatively beyond the settings of camps and ghettos. Liza Wiemers novel The Assignment is about two students challenging their school over a classroom activity that requires some of them to argue in favor of the Final Solution. Weimer illuminates historical facts about the Holocaust with contemporary ideas about what it means to be an ally to marginalized groups. The story is a timely response to real-life assignments.

As a Holocaust educator, the most common question children ask me is: How come the Jews didnt fight back? This is a product of their exposure to the myth that Jews went to their deaths like lambs, and it shows the inadequacy of contemporary Holocaust education. It also helps explain why many young people are prone to taking the Holocaust lightly. Such ignorance can breed indifference; and as the historian Ian Kershaw said, it was indifference that paved the road to Auschwitz. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the Nazis would never recruit members from the unthinking herd of the public. He knew that widespread indifference would help his pursuit of antisemitism more than widespread fanaticism.

We learned many lessons from the war, but the threat of indifference enabling hatred to run riot is as pressing today as it was in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The Holocaust is the most radical demonstration of what can happen when the suffering of others goes unchecked. This is why improving the way we teach it must be a priority for schools everywhere.

Luke Berryman is the founder of The Ninth Candle, a Chicago-based nonprofit trying to end antisemitism by sharing knowledge. He did a Ph.D. on Nazi propaganda at Kings College London, and he has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Jerusalem Post, and the New York Daily News.

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Too often, Holocaust education often blurs fact and fiction - Chalkbeat Colorado

75 Years On, How Cinema Remembers the Holocaust – Hyperallergic

Posted By on July 23, 2021

This is the final part of a three-part series about how the Holocaust has been depicted in cinema. You can read part one, about witness narratives, here, and part two, about the role of testimony, here.

In Yael Reuvenys 2013 film Farewell, Herr Schwarz, the director tries to piece together remnants of her great-uncle Feivush Feivke Schwarzs life. Reuveny, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, wants to understand why Feivke abandoned Judaism after surviving the camps, living the rest of his life in East Germany without ever reuniting with his remaining family. The film explores the echoes of the Holocaust through generations, and how this monumental event continues to impact questions of identity, self, and the Jewish diaspora. Its part of an emerging breed of Holocaust films. Since the people with firsthand experience of this history are by this point dwindling in numbers, these new films deal with further representation questions, the importance of keeping memory alive, and the nature of intergenerational trauma. By now, the Holocaust film has become such an entrenched sub-genre that its also informed the ways that other kinds of violence and historical genocides are depicted in cinema.

Films like Farewell, Herr Schwarz and The Flat (2011) showcase the Holocausts long-term impact on survivors, their descendants, and the societies they live in. As Shoah demonstrated through its construction, this is no past event, but an active agent in intergenerational relations and broader cultural trends. These films use memory to fight the conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place. A recurring question is what we owe to the past. In these films, trauma pulls its interlocutors toward things that happened many years before they were born. They suggest how easily events and people are lost to time, and that remembrance needs to be active rather than passive, requiring engagement with the past, present, and future.

In The Emancipated Spectator, philosopher Jacques Rancire discusses Shoah and offers examples of other films and works of art that engage with what he calls intolerable images images that cannot be experienced without pain and indignation. They are also suspect for a variety of reasons, but notably one of context and spectacle. How can intolerable images persuade or showcase specific conditions of violence rather than the madness of human beings in general, since the latter perspective inspires apathy rather than action? Rancire posits that the only acceptable witness does not want to witness, and that creating and seeing such images, whether real or constructed, suggests a desire to see what should be intolerable. Films like Shoah get around this by oppos[ing] the voice of the image with the lie of the image.

Another film Rancire cites to illustrate this concept is S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003). Director Rithy Panh takes a similar approach to Lanzmann by representing the machine rather than the victims. What he does differently, though, is use the archive and recreation as a means of illustrating the specificity of this genocide. It is necessary, he argues, to treat these archives as part of the system. Rather than present them without comment, the materials are shown to survivors and guards, who are asked to react to them. We thus see both how the killing machine operated and how those involved feel about them in the present.

Panh discusses the importance of memory in his work as a means of engagement, saying, Memory must remain a reference point. What Im looking for is comprehension; I want to understand the nature of the crime, not to establish a cult of memory. Panh also writes in his book The Elimination: I infinitely admire the documentary work of Claude Lanzmann, which is based on speech and the organization of speech. The genius of his Shoah is that it lets the viewer see through words. But I believe that speech can be awakened, amplified, supported by such documents as have managed to escape destruction.

As these films represent radical and philosophical engagements with memory and genocide, the true legacy of Holocaust films has a less noble history. In many ways, works like Shoah and S-21 stand in opposition to how mainstream films sanitize genocide into palatable entertainment. A film like Schindlers List, which embraces classic Hollywood filmmaking, ultimately lacks the perspective to shed light on the totality of genocide in spite of its depiction of horrific violence. It boxes the complexity of human behavior into preestablished conventions, which serves to sanitize the Holocaust itself. While certain aesthetic markers attempt to cast aside sensationalism, they nonetheless feed into audience curiosity without necessarily challenging them. They keep the viewer at arms length, allowing them to be observers who can opt out, or conversely to pore over the most scandalous details of peoples lives and deaths without guilt. Its essential to consider exactly what kinds of questions these films ask of their subjects and the audience.

There are, of course, many other films and filmmakers that engage with questions of genocide without falling for these pitfalls. Atom Egoyans Family Viewing (1987) and Ararat (2002) touch directly and indirectly on the Armenian Genocide as they challenge and explore our need to construct screen memories, especially as they relate to trauma and violence. As with Farewell, Herr Schwarz, they explore memory tied to genocide to explore more expansive ideas related to identity and space.

The very concept of memory becomes an important force both within Holocaust films specifically and more generally within movies that depict genocide. How exactly do we remember, and in what ways do we assure that Never again applies in a broader sense to combat contemporary genocides and the conditions that lead to them? In what ways can art not only educate but also challenge audiences to consider and reconsider their relationship and culpability to death? Why does it so often seem that some genocides are worth considering in mainstream film and others are not?

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75 Years On, How Cinema Remembers the Holocaust - Hyperallergic

How Those Who Lived Through the Holocaust Have Testified in Film – Hyperallergic

Posted By on July 23, 2021

This is the second part of a three-part series about how the Holocaust has been depicted in cinema. You can read part one, about witness narratives, here.

In his memoir The Patagonian Hare, Claude Lanzmann contrasts the endings of Schindlers List (1993) and his own film, Shoah (1985). In the epilogue of Schindler, director Steven Spielberg abandons the narrative framework, giving space to real Schindler Jews as they pay their respects at Schindlers grave in the modern day. Conversely, Shoah ends with a goods train traveling the Polish countryside, recalling the image of a prison transport on its way to a concentration camp. The Hollywood film offers closure and uplift (noting how the descendants of the Schindlerjuden outnumber the entire contemporary Jewish population of Poland), whereas Shoah leaves things ambiguous and unresolved. These differing approaches reflect how witness and testimony accounts differ in approach and impact. Witness narratives present versions of events that are fixed, whereas testimony narratives tend to be more open-ended.

Most testimonial Holocaust films can be understood as either first- or secondhand accounts. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the most notable films to emerge were secondhand, looking at the genocide from an outsiders perspective. Now often understood as essay films, they come from a contemporary understanding of the events, but rarely from a firsthand perspective. While incisive, they are also abstract, employing dispassionate distance. They reflect on humanitys capacity for evil, group-think, and genocide in academic, theoretical terms. Rather than pretend to show complete truth, these filmmakers are aware of the limits of documentary and objectivity. With Night and Fog (1956), Alain Resnais makes clear that the movie is a vector for his own ideas and observations. Direct address and other metafictional devices remind viewers they are watching a reconstruction of reality, rather than an authentic representation of it. Other films that fall under this category include the more abstract but no less powerful Le Sang des btes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949).

Existing between witness and testimony are journalistic documents of events like the Nuremberg trials and later the Eichmann trial. Both center on the testimony of survivors and perpetrators, yet these accounts havent gained the same cultural imprint as footage of the liberation of the camps. That the easier-to-absorb witness images have proved more critical than detailed testimonials has arguably helped solidify a limited cultural understanding of the Holocaust. Such an emphasis frames the events within a narrow perspective that emphasizes victimhood and suffering instead of resilience and memory.

In 1981, with the release of Genocide, we have the first Holocaust documentary to receive an Academy Award. Narrated by Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor, the film explores a wide historical context presented chronologically using archival footage to showcase European Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust. First-person testimonies, mostly in the form of writing and letters, are read by the narrators as images of death and devastation unfold on the screen. The films closing credits depart from the archival material, however, showing contemporary footage of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party to emphasize that the work of preventing genocide is not done, even within the US. Genocide, as well as other films like The Sorrow and the Pity, rely heavily on the horrors of archival images as a means of persuading and educating.

All these films build toward the monumental work of Claude Lanzmanns Shoah (1985). Lanzmann began his career as a journalist and only became a filmmaker later on. His first documentary, Pourquoi Isral (1973), surveyed the state of Israel 25 years after its founding and naturally had the specter of the Holocaust hanging over much of it. The questions that arose during its production would go on to inform Shoah, which took over a decade to make. In his memoir, Lanzmann says that from the beginning, he knew he would not use archival footage: My film would have to take up the ultimate challenge; take the place of the nonexistent images of death in the gas chambers.

Death becomes central to the directors stated vision. The final film, running over nine hours, suggests a profound and unsurmountable absence. Shoah, in essence, occupies a space of radical contradiction, as the dead cannot speak for the dead. It is structured around interviews and features contemporary footage of the concentration camps and nearby villages. The films montage foregoes a chronological account in favor of a more reflective structure. This suggests the impossibility of capturing the full extent of genocide, and challenges the idea of the Holocaust as an event in the past. Instead the horrors and trauma live on in perpetuity. Lanzmann attempts to center those lost, allowing them to speak through the living. Rather than prioritizing individuals, he would write that the film would take on a strict form in German a gestalt recounting the fate of the people as a whole. The expectation of these interviewees was that theirs was not a story of survivors, but of revenants, because they too were fated to die.

Shoah challenges many of the images and ideas normally presented in films about the Holocaust, especially myths that uphold the idea of Europes Jews as passive victims, or even collaborators in their own demise. It also dismantles the idea that the genocide went unnoticed by outside countries until the liberation of the camps. The film not only transformed views of the Holocaust, but also addressed philosophical questions related to the depiction of any genocide on the screen. While its overall approach is vastly different, the way The Act of Killing (2012) challenges preconceptions related to archival documentary can be understood as directly indebted to the rigorous form of Shoah.

Over three decades since the release of Shoah and almost 90 years since the beginning of World War II, the population of Holocaust survivors reduces by the day. This pivotal text remains one of the most vital documentaries ever made. Over the decades, Lanzmann would follow it up with several subsequent films created from unused footage. Yet rather than act as the final word on the Holocaust, it only seemed to open up a more comprehensive discussion. With the possibility of fresh firsthand accounts receding, how does memory play a role in our understanding of the Holocaust in films today?

This series concludes tomorrow.

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How Those Who Lived Through the Holocaust Have Testified in Film - Hyperallergic

How Movies Have Witnessed the Holocaust Over the Decades – Hyperallergic

Posted By on July 23, 2021

In 1945, not long after Germanys surrender, filmmaker George Stevens, best-known at that time for directing romantic comedies, entered Dachau. The images he and his crew captured of the concentration camps liberation would become some of the first the world would see of the Nazi death machine. Stevens and four other notable directors (John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra) formed an all-star frontline propaganda team during World War II. As documented in Five Came Back (both the book by Mark Harris and Netflixs docuseries adaptation of it), from their work we can infer Hollywoods influence on how humanity would come to view the Holocaust. Informed by the practices of the studio system and filtered through the military, they used a variety of documentary approaches to persuade and educate. Perhaps the most powerful tool at their disposal was the idea of direct witness. Indeed, in the 75 years since the end of the war, narratives of both real and fictional witnesses have had the longest-lasting impact on public perception of the Holocaust.

This popular approach individualizes historical experience; such accounts focused first on the liberators and then later on survivors. This emphasis is contentious, however. By their nature, genocide narratives are defined by absence rather than presence. In contemporary accounts from the period, this prioritized first outsider perspectives (often Nazis and Allied soldiers), then later survivors over victims, and in more recent years fiction over history. The images created under these circumstances only reveal partial truths (and sometimes outright lies), ultimately limiting ones understanding of these events. The struggle to situate the unimaginable within the classic, highly Americanized form of narrative filmmaking will always prove fraught, even within the best and most persuasive examples.

Some filmmakers would use footage shot directly by fascists. For example, Capra would use images created by the Third Reich in his series Why We Fight as an attempt to undercut their persuasiveness, hoping his ironic and mocking POV would dissipate their power. French filmmaker Frdric Rossifs 1961 film The Witnesses (originally Le temps du ghetto, or The Time of the Ghetto) combines survivor testimonials with contemporary footage shot by the Nazis to showcase life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Is the subversion of these images possible? There is ample evidence that the Nazis fictionalized or outright fabricated much of their documentary images. As Claude Lanzmann points out in his memoir The Patagonian Hare, images of nightclubs and other scenes within the Warsaw Ghetto were fabricated to combat criticisms of the horrible conditions there. Presented without that context, images intended to maliciously deceive become truths deployed to correct the initial deception.

Allied images of the war tended to fall for different pitfalls. Their images were often sanitized, maintained an outsiders perspective, and served US propaganda purposes before any other concerns. Five Came Back recounts how Stevens ran into another problem and an even more profound failure in their project. While he felt his role change from propagandist to evidence collector (his films would be presented at the Nuremberg trials), he could not come to terms with his culpability and the violence of the cameras gaze. The cost of capturing the death and decay within these camps was high. As Harris points out, in comparison with the other American filmmakers, Stevens only made one attempt to make a war film after his experience: 1959s The Diary of Anne Frank. His perspective was drastically different from those of his peers, who focused on battles or veterans. Though flawed, the film seems to search for the unfathomable, the unseen fate of its protagonist horribly imagined rather than realized. It begets a question: What story do the liberation films actually tell? Many of these debates hinge on questions of the use of these images, and ultimately what they represent. For example, are individual photos intended to depict isolated events within the Holocaust or the Holocaust as a whole? Are witness narratives the most effective way of capturing the horrors?

These images have since proliferated in culture not just as documentary objects, but also within fictional narratives. Susan Sontag would argue that the reproduction of these images and other images of violence would lead to them becoming normalized. While not everyone agrees (notably, Jacques Rancire argues in 2010s The Emancipated Spectator that the media sanitizes the actual violence of war), the ways these images have been used over the decades does suggest an uncomfortable familiarity, that theyve been reused so many times that theyve lost their impact.

Famous fictional or fictionalized explorations of the Holocaust, such as Schindlers List (1993) and Life is Beautiful (1997), search to fill the gap of uncertainty through witness accounts. In conversation with propagandized contemporary images, they attempt to re-center the voices of Jews, notably absent from the first-person documents of liberation. These films have been influential and have had a significant impact on educating the public at large on the Holocaust. As fiction/fictionalizations, however, they run into ethical and philosophical issues. They give voices to people who were lost and are unable to speak about their experiences, or to survivors who represent an overall minority. Hollywoods prioritization of witness narratives fails to capture the scope of what was lost. The iconography of the big screen similarly has the effect of creating new myths. To the public, the screen truth can become shorthand for the real event.

Integrally, many of the most notable films about the Holocaust arrived in the past few decades, where there was just enough distance for viewers to feel a lack of culpability. These films set a template for a new wave of Oscar bait films as well, movies that reveled in tragedy and sanitized complicated binaries and systems. The specific success of the Holocaust movie also works in stark contrast to other films that tackle more recent genocides, that not only feel like still-open wounds, but dont offer the same pat closure as films about long-past events. Writing about Hotel Rwanda in 2005, Christopher Orr discussed this phenomenon within the context of the Oscars:

The contrast between the fortunes of Hotel Rwanda and those of recent Holocaust films such as Schlindlers List, Life is Beautiful, and The Pianist is difficult to miss. The latter are of course easier for us to applaud in part because of their cultural proximity theres none of that Africans-have-been-killing-each-other-for-centuries cynicism muddying our moral waters. But Holocaust films are also easier to applaud thanks to their temporal distance. Most American moviegoers were not alive during the Shoah, and those who were are unlikely to feel in any way culpable. We were the good guys, after all, at least by the final act.

The most celebrated films about the Holocaust and genocide are fundamentally uncomplicated stories that reassure the audience that evil, in a general sense, has been abated. In their frame, genocidal violence is a thing of the past, and the act of remembering is passive rather than active. They tend to comfort rather than engage their viewers.

Writing about 2015s Son of Saul, Richard Brody broached several of these topics by exploring the way director Lszl Nemes engages with questions of representation in his telling of one mans quest to bury a child within Auschwitz. Main character Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, a special squad forced to aid in the extermination process, and thus he has a unique perspective within the camp. The film portrays this perspective with a bracing, claustrophobic approach, making use of offscreen space as a means of suggesting rather than depicting horror and violence. As Brody explains, the film attempts to negate dehumanizing stereotypes while also using its unique framework to rethink witness narratives by giving the audience almost literal tunnel vision. He writes:

Nemes renounces the act of total and transparent representation he films Sauls experiences and observations as if he cant fully represent them dramatically by actors on sets. The enormity of the events defies dramatization without utterly eluding it. Yet the muffling of the image suggests another mode of transmission the word, in the future tense. The events that Saul sees and the actions that he takes will survive, if they survive at all, through Sauls eventual verbal testimony if, in fact, Saul survives (no spoilers here).

Brody argues that the film, while a compelling argument, fails compared to Lanzmanns pivotal documentary Shoah, which focuses on testimony rather than archival footage. Nemess film tempers and humanizes the metaphysical radicalism of Lanzmanns cinema. In the face of Lanzmanns existential void and moral paradoxes, Nemes offers a tale of ordinary decency applied in indecent circumstances. Son of Saul engages with the problematic representations of Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent depictions of the Holocaust while also considering the philosophical weight of thinkers like Lanzmann, who have been critical of the various modes of representation and how they solidify untruths. Yet through the dramatization of genocide, it arguably falls for many of the problems it is attempting to counter.

The persuasive power of Hollywood has come to shape our global understanding of the Holocaust on screen, but it is by no means a definitive perspective. Looking beyond witness frameworks, we land on films that deal with testimony and memory, foregoing classical narrative forms in favor of more radical and challenging images.

This is the first part of a three-part series. Part two, about the role of testimony in the cinema of the Holocaust, publishes tomorrow.

Continued here:

How Movies Have Witnessed the Holocaust Over the Decades - Hyperallergic


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