Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 1, 2021

(JTA) Many of Twitters cryptocurrency zealots are often notorious trolls, but one particular thought leader stands out from the rest. He happens to be a rabbi.

Twitter people either use it to scream at each other and not be nice, which I dont like, says micro-influencer Rabbi Michael Caras, also known as @thebitcoinrabbi. I enjoy connecting with my two communities through Twitter, both Jewish Twitter and Bitcoin Twitter.

Caras, a rabbi associated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, is fascinated by the way that Bitcoin, both the network and the asset, relates to halacha (Jewish law). And since hes quite vocal about it online, Caras says that strangers slide into his Twitter messages each week to ask for advice and spiritual guidance on the topic.

Before serving as a public bridge between the two worlds, he studied at Yeshiva Ohr Tmimim in Israel and now teaches both Judaism and technology classes at Maimonides Hebrew Day School in New York. Caras has been interested in Bitcoin since 2017, and in 2019 he published a childrens book about it that has sold more than 10,000 copies.

The book, a secular introduction to basic economics for kids, tells a tale of children learning about how to use Bitcoin as money by running a lemonade stand in a town called Bitville.

Caras has also spoken at synagogues and Jewish youth groups about Bitcoin and Judaism, including how the history of money is discussed in the Torah.

There are people who are Jewish but not observant who have never talked to a rabbi any other time, he says. Because they feel some type of kinship with me through Bitcoin Twitter, theyll feel comfortable that I will give them relevant information without lecturing them.

I also have a WhatsApp chat where people often ask me privately for guidance as well. Sometimes they have a Bitcoin question, in some way, and Im happy to help. Im happy to be that resource for the community, especially for things like private key management.

Although there are thousands of things now called cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is the worlds oldest and most decentralized blockchain network, with the most diverse population of users as of 2021. People can store, send and receive currencies like Bitcoin without a third party, like a bank.

Most avid cryptocurrency users keep track of transactions with a public network and a ledger called a blockchain. For example, the Bitcoin ledger is a record of all transitions with bitcoin (the asset). However, many cryptocurrency traders prefer to use mainstream financial marketplaces (such as Fidelity or the Israeli company eToro), which dont necessarily need to use the public blockchain for all transactions.

Caras is among the avid users who prefer to participate in the grassroots Bitcoin network, transacting with open source tools rather than merely trading cryptocurrency like stocks.

Caras, like many rabbis, is a huge fan of old records, ledgers and sacred secrets. With regards to the private key management he mentioned, bitcoin users keep track of their bitcoin using a unique password called a private key protect that key, and the bitcoin will remain in your custody. Thats why knowledge related to private key management is so important to Caras.

The public blockchain ledger is not unlike the way Jewish communities maintained written records about their societies for thousands of years. This combination of history and technology fascinates Caras.

We have a the chain of tradition quite literally in Hebrew, this point of following the tradition back in written history, he says. We are continuing a chain, and it is a continuous chain. There are soft forks and hard forks within Judaism, different customs, like protocols, that are compatible with each other.

Caras, 31, was raised in a fairly secular household, he says, and considered a degree in computer science before switching to rabbinical school. His brother, also a well-known Bitcoin advocate, became more religious after visiting a Chabad house as a teenager and Caras followed suit.

Now a father of six and observant member of the Chabad movement, Caras finds many similarities between the cypherpunk ethos and Judaism. Hes not alone, as there are numerous WhatsApp groups for Jewish crypto fans, including the Jewish Crypto Chat where Caras is among nearly 190 participants.

Judaism has a lot of legal frameworks for how money is used. A Jewish wedding is a transaction. The groom puts a ring on her finger because he needs to give her something of value under the huppah. [In private DMs] I address questions like, could that wedding transaction be done with bitcoin? he says.

Caras is sometimes asked: Can I mine Bitcoin during a day of rest? (Camilo Freedman/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

As a family, Caras and his wife see Bitcoin stewardship as part of their household virtues.

Hopefully, the majority of the time, we use this technology for good, he says. Thats what I like to encourage people to think about.

Theres always a way to apply guidance from the Torah to new conundrums in the modern world. Some people have asked Caras about running trading bots or bitcoin mining on Shabbat, or if checking the always fluctuating bitcoin price (its value compared to the dollar) disrupts from a day of rest.

Bitcoin is often used for donating to charity and securing savings. On the other hand, there are, of course, controversial and harmful ways to use bitcoin. For example, Hamas the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip and is deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Israel has reportedly fundraised using the cryptocurrency.

Caras, who lived in Israel for four years of rabbinical school and has a brother who lives there, says hes been thinking a lot about the Holy Land since the most recent conflict. Its impossible to say exactly how many bitcoin users there are in Israel, although some local exchanges have garnered more than 55,000 users (each) and thousands of people work in the local crypto industry, including some companies that expanded globally to serve millions. (On a much smaller scale, some Palestinian bitcoin dealers also get their wares from Tel Avivs same crypto hubs.)

Caras strongly believes in Israels right to defend itself, and hopes that Bitcoin could present economic opportunities that could lessen the stranglehold he says that Hamas has on the population of Gaza. Before the pandemic, in 2019, several Gazan Bitcoin dealers were reportedly transacting with more than $5 million worth of cryptocurrency each every month for civilian use cases like international shopping, paying tuition abroad or accepting freelance payments without PayPal or credit cards.

Im not concerned about Hamas using relatively small amounts of bitcoin to fund their terrorism, as it seems rather insignificant compared to their other funding methods, Caras says. Terrorists use cellphones and electricity and every other type of technology that most people use for good peaceful purposes.

I am glad that individual Palestinians can use a money which cant be easily controlled or taken from them by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.

This sentiment is common among Caras Twitter compatriots. Israeli investor Eylon Aviv of the crypto-savvy fund Collider Ventures, who knows Caras and enjoys his Twitter feed, says the promise here is for Palestinians to not be dependent on the financial services provided by these terrorist organizations.

Aviv also agrees with Caras that the Bitcoin ethos complements Jewish ethics.

Basically every holiday is insert an overpowering someone who tried to kill us, they fail, and we celebrate. The celebration is about the freedom and liberation that happens around the unsuccessful elimination attempt, Aviv says, adding that censorship, resistance, loss and liberation are all recurring themes throughout Jewish history.

As a tool for self-sovereign transactions, people fleeing a dictatorship or freely transact despite persecution often use bitcoin.

And some Jewish users like Aviv wonder if Bitcoin would be useful if a Holocaust-like situation were to arise again, with governments and armies seizing assets from Jewish communities. Bitcoin would be easier to escape with.

Israeli crypto industry veteran Danny Brown Wolf thinks so, saying that being Jewish, we pretty much all have in our family history some form of immigration story that involves being forced to leave assets behind.

Given this history, Jews of all peoples ought to appreciate financial sovereignty, she says.

To be clear, Caras isnt an advocate for any blockchain revolution. He only answers questions when asked and firmly considers himself a maximalist, meaning he only uses Bitcoin, no other cryptocurrency. He thinks users energy is best spent on Bitcoin rather than exploring new token experiments.

Im a hardcore maximalist. I dont believe the blockchain has any use case outside of Bitcoin and securing the Bitcoin blockchain, Caras says. My brother in Israel tells me about every blockchain thing under the sun, but Ive yet to see anything positive that its useful for beyond that.

Instead, Caras prefers to contemplate what Jewish law says about loans and earning interest, for example, so he can learn for himself and help others learn how to apply Jewish ethics to the way he manages his Bitcoin.

Every piece of technology in this world, its up to us to choose for ourselves, Caras says, whether we use technology for good or bad.

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Meet the beloved 'Bitcoin Rabbi' of Twitter - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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Posted By admin on July 1, 2021

Early in his Presidency, Joe Biden set the Fourth of July as a deadline, both for seventy per cent of Americans to receive one shot of the vaccine and, more broadly, for a return to normalcy, so that we could celebrate, maskless, with family and friends. Although the former goal hasnt yet been reached, the latter feels more and more achievable, as cities slowly emerge from lockdown. In his new cover, R. Kikuo Johnson depicts a New York Fourth, complete with hot dogs, fireworks, and loved ones nearby. We recently asked Johnson about his holiday plans, his most memorable Independence Day encounter, and how his neighborhood came together during the pandemic.

You live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn. How did the neighborhood come together during the past year?

Ive been so impressed by the way Bed-Stuy organized during the pandemicfrom food distribution for the needy to comedy shows in the park to closing down the street for full opera performances. The peak may have been last November: in my almost twenty years in the city, I dont think Ive ever felt a stronger sense of togetherness than I did on the day Bidens victory was announced. It felt like the entire neighborhood was in the street celebrating. Every corner was absolute pandemonium.

Strangers in New York often share brief moments of serendipity. Do you have a favorite story about a chance encounter?

As a matter of fact, yes. Years ago, I was cycling home through Brooklyn, and a man standing in the middle of the bike lane timidly flagged me down. It was a hot Friday night, and the man, young and Hasidic, was sweating in an overcoat and muttering something about an air-conditioner. Im not religious, but I had lived in Brooklyn long enough to know that his religion forbade him from operating electrical devices after dark on Fridays. He accepted my offer of help, and walked me through his entire apartment, past a long dining table with more than a dozen chairs, to a back room where an elderly woman sat beneath a silent air-conditioner. The man said something urgent to her in Yiddish, and she looked at me, relieved. I flipped the unit on, and she thanked me very sincerely and offered me some orange juice. Smiling, I declined, and the man walked me out, and I biked my way home. This was a day or two after the Fourth of July, and Ive thought about that man and woman every Fourth of July since.

You grew up in Hawaii. Are there specific state traditions for Independence Day?

Many people in Hawaii celebrate with the usual barbecues and fireworks. Others are indifferent, and some actively refute the holiday in protest of the islands colonial history. But, over all, the Fourth is not as big a deal on Maui as it is in the East Coast places Ive lived in.

This image was inspired by some of your experiences watching fireworks on Brooklyn rooftops. What are your plans for this July 4th? And how did you celebrate during quarantine?

With no car, and all travel plans thwarted by the pandemic, my partner and I spent last summer taking long bike rides all over the city, from Inwood to the Rockaways. Last July 4th, we explored the walking trails surrounding the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. It was a peaceful escape from our work-from-home routine. But, this year, Im looking forward to a celebration where I can be surrounded by friends.

See below for more covers celebrating Independence Day:

Find R. Kikuo Johnsons covers, cartoons, and more in the Cond Nast Store.

A previous version of this post incorrectly identified residents of Hawaii.

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R. Kikuo Johnsons Shared Celebration - The New Yorker

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Posted By admin on July 1, 2021

LOS ANGELES, June 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --L.A. based Vision Films, Inc.has secured the worldwide rights to Tango Shalom. From the people who brought you My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the long-awaited Joel Zwick comedy dance film includes Golden Globe Nominee Lainie Kazan together again with Oscar-nominated Rene Taylor. It will be released theatrically in August andon VOD and DVD in October of 2021.

Sweeping up awards at top film festivals worldwide, Tango Shalom is directed by Gabriel Bologna and produced by Jos and Claudio Laniado of Convivencia Forever Films. Co-written by Jos Laniado and Emmy and Academy Award-nominated Joseph Bologna (My Favorite Year, Blame It On Rio, Big Daddy, Lovers and Other Strangers), produced by Joel Zwick (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Robert Meyer Burnett (Agent Cody Banks franchise), Zizi Bologna, and Jordi Caballero.

The Laniado Brothers, who collaborated with Joe on the script, are Egyptian Jewish Refugees who fled with their family to Argentina where they discovered Tango. Besides being a family affair, both on and off screen, Tango Shalom is being touted as the first film in history that was a joint collaboration with The Vatican, a Hasidic Synagogue, a Mosque, and a Sikh Temple, promoting a very timely, and timeless, message of peace, tolerance, and love in these fraught times.

TRAILER: https://youtu.be/4I5Lvp_TPXE

Synopsis: When a female Tango dancer asks a rabbi to enter a dance competition, there's one big problemdue to his Orthodox beliefs, he's not allowed to touch her! Desperately in need of splitting the prize money to save his Hebrew school from bankruptcy, they develop a plan to enter the competition without sacrificing his faith. The bonds of family and community are tested one dazzling dance step at a time in this lighthearted fable.

The film stars Lainie Kazan (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Don't Mess With The Zohan), Karina Smirnoff (Dancing With The Stars), Academy and Emmy Award-winner Rene Taylor (Adam Sandler's The Do Over, The Producers, CBS' The Nanny, How to Be a Latin Lover), Jos Laniado (Milcho Manchevski's Bikini Moon), Claudio Laniado (Mudbound), Bern Cohen (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and Judi Beecher (Taken 3, Family is Family, La Garconne).

Soundtrack provided by Universal Music includes multiple Grammy Award-winning Gordon Goodwin, Latin Grammy-nominated Tango sensation Daniel Binelli, British chart-toppers Touch and Go, The Circolo S. Pietro del Vaticano Choir, as well as modern Klezmer bands Golem, The Burning Bush, and Barcelona Gypsy Klezmer Band. Score by Zoe Tiganouria and Zizi Bologna. All the dance sequences were choreographed by Jordi Caballero who worked with Madonna, The Spice Girls, and was Supervising Choreographer for Dancing With The Stars.

http://www.tangoshalommovie.com http://www.visionfilms.net

Media contact: Andrea McKinnon [emailprotected](818) 415-9442

SOURCE Vision Films, Inc.

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Vision Films Acquires Worldwide Rights To "Tango Shalom" The Award-Winning Dance Comedy About Faith, Peace, and Tolerance - PRNewswire

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Posted By admin on July 1, 2021

In Yishai Sarids novel, The Memory Monster (Restless Books), the books unnamed narrator is an Israeli Holocaust scholar who leads high school heritage trips to Poland. His role involves conveying the heroism and the suffering of the Polish Jewish community during the Holocaust to young Israelis.

The narrator works from a script, a standard memorization that all guides use. But increasingly, he is unable to stop stepping over the line. His job becomes an obsession. His detailed editorializing and shocking details begin to repel and frighten the groups he is supposed to enlighten. As the novel progresses, the narrator begins to lose control of his emotions and mental equilibrium, slipping into the clutches of the memory monster.

Yishai Sarid is the son of Yossi Sarid. His dad was chairman of the left-wing Meretz party. Yishai served as an IDF intelligence officer and later as an assistant district attorney in Tel Aviv prosecuting criminal cases. The Memory Monster, his fifth novel, stirred up controversy because it examines the various healthy and unhealthy ways Israelis preserve memory of the Shoah.

One time in Krakow, the narrator encounters a group of Israeli Hasidim, who are visiting the grave of Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, a disciple of Rabbi DovBer, the Maggid of Mezritch, and a colleague of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi. A Hasid explains that they journey to the rabbis grave to ask for forgiveness, sing, dance and eat.

Dont you visit the camps at all? asks the narrator.

No. What for? answers the Hasid. What do we have to look for in those evil places? We live our lives seeking sacredness and steering clear of filth.

In contrast, Israeli high school students, who make up the bulk of the narrators audience, take away a different perspective.

What has this trip taught you, the narrator asks a group of students on the last night of their visit to Poland. The students answer:

To never forget.

To be strong Jews.

To be moral but strong.

Then, one boy responds, I think that in order to survive, we need to be a little bit Nazi, too.

The narrator remarks to himself that the young man is only saying what adults say among themselves. The narrator pushes back, What do you mean?

That we have to be able to kill mercilessly. We dont stand a chance if were too soft. Sometimes, theres no choice but to hurt civilians, too. Its hard to distinguish civilians from terrorists . This is, after all, a war of survival. Its us or them. We wont let this happen to us again.

Lets ask a hard question:

You are a Polish mother or father living on a small farm in 1942. One evening theres a knock at the door. Its a stranger, a young Jewish boy. He tells you that his family and all the Jews of the village have been rounded up and placed on a train to an unknown destination. He asks for something to eat.

Theres a Nazi law in Poland. Anyone knowingly helping Jews by providing them shelter and/or supplying them with food is subject to the death penalty. That includes the rescuers family.

What would you do? Would you be too afraid to take the risk?

Thats the only question we can ask ourselves as human beings, states the narrator.

This is a novel that poses a number of hard questions to readers. It also essentially asks how does one honor the memory of the Shoah without becoming consumed by it?

In his novels, Sarid is concerned about the issues that divide human beings from each other. As an Israeli, he understands the determination to protect the land from the enmity of others. At the same time, he also understands the possibility of a larger sense of humanity.

This is the best novel Ive read this year.

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Author probes the legacy of the Holocaust in latest book - Jewish Herald-Voice

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Posted By admin on July 1, 2021

Protesters demonstrate in front of the Reichstag, during a rally against government restrictions related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, in Berlin, Germany, Aug. 29, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Christian Mang.

According to a comprehensive annual report released on Monday, Germany saw a rise in antisemitic acts in 2020 driven by incidents related to the coronavirus and cases of abusive behavior at rallies against measures to control the pandemic.

Antisemitic incidents documented by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) last year amounted to 1,909 an increase of 450 acts compared with 2019, the associations 2020 report said. That added up to an average of 159 antisemitic incidents per month, or over five incidents per day.

Danger to Jews comes from many sides: conspiracist milieu during the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Israel activists during escalations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, plus the constant threat from right-wing extremism, said Benjamin Steinitz, executive director of RIAS. Antisemitism is still multifaceted in Germany, and open expression of this hate is increasingly normalized. No matter in what form it must be resolutely ostracized and rejected.

An analysis of documented incidents showed that there were fewer physical assaults and threats in 2020, also due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. But a number of activists used the crisis as an opportunity to express themselves in an antisemitic manner becoming especially pronounced in the protests against anti-COVID measures, with one quarter of all documented incidents found to be directly related to the pandemic. 284 cases involved antisemitic content appearing at rallies against COVID-19 measures in speeches, on signs or on clothing. A large number of rallies throughout Germany involved antisemitic conspiracy myths and trivialization of the Shoah.

On a geographical comparison, three of the four regional reporting offices that participated in the nationwide documentation registered more antisemitic incidents than in the year before: 30% more in Bavaria, 13% in Berlin, 3% in Brandenburg. Only Schleswig-Holstein saw a slight decrease, of 5%. For the first time, RIAS also published figures for the rest of Germany, where 472 antisemitic incidents were recorded.

A third of all recorded antisemitic incidents nationwide, or 644, took place online. Of these, 550 incidents were reported in Berlin.

Insults at school or during sport events, hate messages on the Internet, arson attacks on synagogues these are also part of the reality of life for Jewish people 1,700 years after the first mention of Jewish communities in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, commented Abraham Lehrer, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Unfortunately, this is nothing new for the post-war history of this country either. But while we experience hostility from all directions, we notice a loud silence from the middle of society, especially on Israel-related antisemitism.

The report found a lower proportion of Israel-related antisemitism in 2020, although it noted the recent openly antisemitic rallies on Germanys streets as well as the assaults on and threats against Jewish individuals and institutions in May of 2021 suggested that tendency is not likely to repeat itself this year.

The massive mobilization of antisemitism from different social and political milieus poses an increasing danger. Therein lies the dangerous dynamic of antisemitism. As the report shows, growing antisemitism from the right-wing extremist milieu was joined by antisemitic conspiracist mobilization in the context of the pandemic, said Kim Robin Stoller, director of the International Institute for Education and Research on Antisemitism (IIBSA). This year, the numerous antisemitic incidents in the context of the war by the terrorist organization Hamas show the antisemitic mobilization ability of Arab, Turkish and Palestinian nationalist and Islamist forces.

RIAS was founded in October 2018 to ensure uniform recording and documentation of antisemitic incidents by civil society organizations nationwide.

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'Hostility from All Directions': National Report Confirms Rise in German Antisemitism Fueled by Pandemic - Algemeiner

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Posted By admin on June 29, 2021

(JTA) Until a 13-story building inexplicably collapsed in the middle of the night, placing the whereabouts and lives of 159 residents in doubt, few gave Surfside, Florida, very much thought before last week. The town was, after all, a South Florida misnomer. Theres no surfing. The white caps on the Atlantic Ocean never provide enough tubular lift. The people of Surfside skew older. Nearly half its 6,000 residents are Jewish, and of those, many are Orthodox.

You can call Surfside sleepy, but even that wouldnt describe it. Nothing truly special had ever happened there. Now, with a tragedy so titanic and still unfolding its name will become synonymous with misery.

To the casual observer, Surfside was a breakaway township from its more widely known neighbor, Miami Beach, just to its south. Those over the border on Miami Beach, and in Bal Harbour, the village to Surfsides immediate north, for many decades had good reason to regard themselves as South Floridas very own Old City of Jerusalem a mixed enclavewith a majorJewish quarter, and a bit more decadence.

Surfside didnt have the Art Deco Jazz Age sparkle or swinger elegance that the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau hotels offered back in the 1950s into the 70s. In Surfside, the Americana was the swankiest hotel. It once showcased a very young Jackson 5, long before any Billie Jean took notice of Michael. A rare excitement, but the towns residents didnt beg for more. Surfside enjoyed the stillness on land and sea.

I know about Surfside. I grew up on 74th Street on Miami Beach. Thehorrific spectacle that FEMA has now declared to be a national emergency site is on 87th Street. By the time the Champlain Towers was built in 1981, I had long decamped for college and then New York.

I frequently return to Miami Beach, but mostly in my imagination. Many of my novels have featured scenes with Miami Beach as the backdrop. My last one, How Sweet It Is!, selected by the City of Miami Beach as its Centennial Book, is a nostalgic return to 1972 a valentine, I call it when Miami Beach was, oddly, the center of the world.

During that summer, Miami Beach hosted both the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions. Unlike the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the Miami Beach police somehow avoided clubbing the heads of Vietnam War protesters.

Jackie Gleason, who no longer had his TV variety show once filmed live on Miami Beach was palling around with his buddy, Frank Sinatra, who had recently retired for the first time. You could find them drinking in hotels along Collins Avenue, recapturing the easy camaraderie of their younger days at Toots Shors saloon near the Theater District in Manhattan.

The cavalcade of stars did not stop there. Muhammad Ali sparred at Angelo Dundees 5th Street Gym and did speed work on the quicksand of the beach in heavy sweat clothes. He was trying to reclaim the heavyweight championship forfeited when he conscientiously objected to fighting the Vietcong.

Meyer Lansky, the notorious Jewish gangster who two years later would be fictionalized in The Godfather Part II, had in 1972 just been extradited from Israel back to Miami Beach to stand trial for tax fraud. He would spend his days at Wolfies Restaurant on 21st Street surrounded by an aging crew of Jewish wise guys still smarting over Fidel Castros takeover of their Havana casinos in 1959.

All of them appear in How Sweet It Is! (yes, Gleasons signature signoff), reimagined, of course along with one more special guest. The Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, not long thereafter a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature,was spending the wintersin Surfside. While therehe unsparingly fictionalized the Jews of Poland before the Holocaust, and those who survived and lived in New York thereafter, capturing their comical lives of heartbreak, betrayal and loss.

Ensconced just over the Miami Beach city line, situated right in between two Jewish enclaves populated with those who had fled or escaped one hardship or another, Singer made a canny choice for a writer with a gravitational pull for the shortcomings and desperate moral choices of humankind.

One wonders what he might have written about the Champlain Towers today, a short distance from his own apartment.

All the avenues of Surfside were named for American and British authors. (Just west of the Champlain are Carlyle, Dickens, Irving and Emerson avenues.) Eventually a street would be named for him. He must have enjoyed the irony that some of the hotels of Surfside once restricted Jews. One shamelessly boasted Always a view, never a Jew.

Singer strolled the sunbaked landscape in a white suit and impish teardrop fedora. Always taking notes, he fiercely studied and measured the patterns of these transplanted Jews: melting snowbirds and Holocaust survivors looking to the sun to cure memories of more ashen, cloudier days; widows and divorcees looking for a male ticket back to the Northeast or out of loneliness; young families tired of the transit strikes and crime waves of New York; Hasidim who dressed in the sweltering Sunshine State as if still in Lublin; and vaudevillians wearing makeup suitable to the burlesque surroundings of Miami Beach.

All of them immortalized in Kodak color, or in the pages of My Love Affair with Miami Beach, a book of photos by Richard Nagler, for which Singer wrote the introduction in 1990. Imagine them as Singer once did: plotting affairs, swatting tennis balls, staring at stock tickers, clacking mah jongg tiles, gliding discs along shuffleboard courts and gesturing wildly about socialism.

For me, a vacation in Miami Beach was a chance to be among my own people, Singer wrote.

He found them sitting on the Broadway medians and inside the cafeterias on the Upper West Side, too, of course. But the Jews from Miami Beach were somehow of a different species and not only because they were more prone to skin cancer.

It was a Shangri-La of Jewish misadventure, a shtetl still trembling but without Cossacks, the Chosen People out of choices, the detour of a once wandering tribe finally at rest in and around sleepy Surfside.

And now it is home to new waves of Jews, reflecting the areas diversity: retirees, of course, but also younger and wealthier Jewish families, many drawn to a booming Chabad; a large cohort of Hispanic Jews with feet in North and Latin America; a smattering of Israelis; and more Sephardic Jews than the national average.

The residents of the Champlain Towers were asleep until a nightmare roused them. Will any survive to tell this tragic tale? In time, this beachside plot will become another reminder of senseless Jewish death in America acts of hate, or negligence, or of God: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory firein Manhattan and the massacre atMarjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; the Leo Frank lynching, The Temple bombing in Atlanta, the Crown Heights riots; and the antisemitic shootings at the Jewish Community Center of Los Angeles and Jewish Federation of Seattle, and then at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and Chabad synagogue in Poway, California.

At times like these, disasters, whether unnatural or manmade, leave the same feelings of loss.

Miami Beach has served as a refuge for some, and as a playground for others. An infinite coastline of condos always seemed to be rising from the sand. Today, unimaginably, we know that one can come crashing down.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

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The Surfside tragedy recalls South Florida's long hold on the Jewish imagination and reality - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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Posted By admin on June 29, 2021

Matthew Lee| Associated Press

New York Holocaust survivors reunite post-pandemic

After more than a year of isolation due to the coronavirus, dozens of New York-area Holocaust survivors reunite for a concert held in their honor. (June 14)

AP

BERLIN The United States and Germany launched a new initiative Thursday to stem an alarming rise in antisemitism and Holocaust denial around the world.

The two governments announced the start of a U.S.-Germany Holocaust Dialogue that seeks to reverse the trend that gained traction during the coronavirus pandemic amid a surge in political populism across Europe and the U.S. The dialogue creates a way to develop educational and messaging tools to teach youth and others about the crimes of Nazis and their collaborators.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and several Holocaust survivors were present for the launch at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. All cited links between Holocaust denial, revisionism and ignorance to growing antisemitism as well as to broader discrimination against minorities.

More: Marjorie Taylor Greene apologizes for comparing COVID face masks, Holocaust

"Holocaust denial and other forms of antisemitism often go hand in hand with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, other hatred," said Blinken, who is the step-son of a Holocaust survivor. "It's also a rallying cry for those who seek to tear down our democracies, which we've seen in both our countries, (and) often a precursor to violence."

Maas echoed Blinken's comments, underscoring the importance of Germany "the country of the perpetrators," he said taking in a leading role in the project.

"In recent years, we have seen antisemitism and racism eating into our society," Maas said. "Just think of the Yellow Star badge as seen at demonstrations against COVID measures, of the torrent of antisemitic conspiracy theories on the Internet, of the attacks on synagogues and on Jewish people living in our countries, of the rioters in front of the Bundestag or the rampaging mob in the U.S. capital."

With advancing age severely reducing the number of Holocaust survivors and dimming first-hand memories of the atrocities, Blinken and Maas said the new dialogue would produce innovative ways to educate younger generations about the Holocaust and the troubling buildup that led to the mass extermination of Jews and others in Nazi Germany and elsewhere.

"The Shoah was not a sharp fall, but a gradual descent into darkness," Blinken said.

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US, Germany confront rising antisemitism, Holocaust denial - USA TODAY

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Posted By admin on June 29, 2021

1. Mountain Brook Council meeting packed to capacity with concerns of diversity teachings  Alabama's News Leader
2. Mountain Brook city council plans to take questions from the public on diversity training in schools  WBRC
3. Mountain Brook Schools diversity imitative drawing attention from community members  WIAT - CBS42.com
4. Mountain Brook backtracks on anti-bias training after parent criticism links to critical race theory  AL.com
5. Mountain Brook Residents Sound Off About Diversity Initiative  Patch.com
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Mountain Brook Council meeting packed to capacity with concerns of diversity teachings - Alabama's News Leader

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Posted By admin on June 29, 2021

This article is part of a deep dive on the Jan. 6 riot in Washington and creeping authoritarianism in America. See all of our work here.

The Capitol riots were rife with symbols of humanitys hate-filled past, but perhaps one of the most startling and enduring images was that of a man in a sweatshirt that said Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom a reference to the eponymous Nazi extermination camp and its infamous motto, Arbeit Macht Frei.

A new Morning Consult survey tracking right-wing authoritarian beliefs shows that while not all believers of the conspiracy theory that helped spur the insurrection are antisemites, a large majority of adherents to a century-old antisemitic hoax are also believers of QAnon. And though efforts to deplatform the conspiracy group have sent QAnon underground, data shows that believers views on the issues that led to the insurrection track closely with those of self-identified U.S. conservatives.

U.S. adults in the April 26-27 survey were asked questions regarding two notable conspiracy theories: QAnon described as a belief that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles made up of left-wing politicians, religious figures and Hollywood elites and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document first published in the early 1900s that alleges a Jewish plot to take over major institutions in an effort at world domination.

Seventy-eight percent of U.S. respondents who agreed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also agreed with QAnon, while 49 percent of QAnon adherents agreed with the century-old antisemitic slur, compared to 32 percent of right-leaning adults and just 11 percent of left-leaning adults.

Although we wouldnt say initially that QAnon had antisemitic tropes, very quickly it became apparent that there was a strain within QAnon belief that articulated some of these very clearly antisemitic tropes, said Joanna Mendelson, associate director of the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism. More specifically, QAnon adherents identify Jewish control of the media, the banks and the government as being behind the Deep State, helping to manipulate the levers of society and undermine trust.

The group has undergone a sea change in recent months: Both Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. started cracking down on QAnon communities and content as early as last summer, and sought to strengthen their moderation efforts following the insurrection, effectively deplatforming the conspiracy group.

A spokesman for Twitter said the company has been clear that it will take strong action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and since Jan. 8 has suspended more than 150,000 accounts that were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service.

Following the failure of the Stop the Steal rallies and Capitol insurrection to prevent Bidens presidency, the QAnon movement has been retooling and reorganizing.

Q hasnt posted since December, said Aoife Gallagher, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogues Digital Analysis Unit, referring to the conspiracy theorys eponymous leader who spurred the movement with his Q drops. Really what a lot of the community is doing is that theyre latching on to different influencers that have built up audiences over the last few years. And many of those influencers are now flourishing on less-moderated spaces such as Telegram, which Mendelson described as lions dens for extremist ideology.

Take GhostEzra, for instance, essentially a marginal figure when it came to QAnon while on Twitter, who had roughly 18,000 followers prior to the mass ban, but who now has essentially amassed 338,000 subscribers, said Mendelson.

The QAnon influencer, who was described by Vice News last month as the subject of a war within the community due to his openly antisemitic posts and Holocaust denialism, in a very short space of time pivoted to very, very blatant antisemitism borderline neo-Nazism, Gallagher said.

When you remove QAnon communities from Facebook and the like, like that, youre pushing them into more extremist spaces, she added. Now, I do think that it stops them building their audience in the same way that they were able to use the algorithms of Facebook and YouTube to build their audience over the last number of years.

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.

But that doesnt mean QAnon has disappeared. Instead, ideas that originated in the QAnon space such as allegations of widespread voter fraud are now filtering into mainstream right-wing ideology, without the name attached.

In the survey, more than 3 in 5 right-leaning adults said they agreed that Joe Biden won the election due to widespread voter fraud, roughly on par with the share of QAnon and Protocols believers who said the same.

You cant overstate, really, how much QAnon had a role in what happened on Jan. 6, Gallagher said. QAnon had been pushing voter fraud claims well before last year.

When it came to the Capitol riots, QAnon believers and those who agree with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were basically split on whether the insurrectionists were there to protect or undermine the government, though both groups were slightly more likely than right-leaning adults to say it was the former.

While the Capitol rioters did not succeed in overturning the election, QAnon circles are still focused on the fight.

Were seeing them talk about themes that either ask for auditing of the election or that make claims that Trump will be reinstated or identify or promote a similar belief, Mendelson said. A Morning Consult survey conducted earlier this month found that 29 percent of GOP voters thought it likely the former president would return to office sometime this year. And a different survey showed that just over half of Republicans thought election reviews could change the outcome of the 2020 contest.

I think the influence of QAnon in the wider Republican Party is huge, Gallagher said. But people wouldnt recognize that its QAnon.

Experts say QAnon beliefs have also filtered into the halls of Congress, with both Mendelson and Gallagher citing freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as an example of the groups mainstream influence.

Shes kind of nearly put herself in there as one of the de facto leaders of that movement now, Gallagher said, even though shes disavowed it, but she still plays into their narratives all the time.

Greene has come under fire over the past few months for her controversial statements, including a 2018 Facebook post blaming the Rothschilds a Jewish banking family that has been the subject of many antisemitic conspiracy theories for California wildfires and a tweet comparing vaccination identification to the gold stars Nazis forced Jewish people to wear during the Holocaust. (She has since apologized for the equivalence.)

Earlier this month, she also tweeted a conspiracy theory that the Deep State and Federal Bureau of Investigation operatives were involved in organizing and carrying out the Jan 6th Capitol riot.

Greene said in a statement emailed to Morning Consult that I have never once promoted Q Anon as a candidate or a member of Congress, but do you know who has promoted it nonstop: the media, just like you are doing with this article. Nancy Pelosi and CNN believe in Q Anon far more than I ever did.

Per a tweet from Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer earlier this year, Greene in December posted on Twitter praising an article by Gab Chief Executive Andrew Torba in which he promotes QAnon and calls the conspiracy group a refreshing and objective flow of information.

In this current landscape, we are seeing mainstream figures, thought leaders and politicians push extremist narratives in the public sphere, Mendelson said. And increasingly, the line is becoming very blurred between these fringe beliefs and some of these more conservative ideals.

Data indicates that not only are the lines becoming blurred, but that fringe belief groups and the U.S. right wing are largely on the same page when it comes to authoritarian tendencies. As part of its survey, Morning Consult polled adults in eight countries and ranked their responses based on a right-wing authoritarianism scale originally created by longtime authoritarian researcher Bob Altemeyer.

The findings show that not only does the United States right flank have the highest mean ranking among that group in all countries (109.3, 10 points higher than the next-highest ranking), but so do its QAnon believers, with both groups ranking above 100 on the scale, which starts at 20 and ends at 180. Canadas adherents of the Protocols of Elders of Zion actually had a slightly higher mean score than their American counterparts, but both groups were above 100 and within a third of a point of each other.

Any solution to the proliferation of QAnon, both experts said, must involve the tech industry.

The Internet Association, a stakeholder group representing major internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, said in an emailed statement that internet companies have taken and continue to take thoughtful actions to address the abuse of their services by extremist groups, including by banning accounts and removing threatening or harmful content. Policies and enforcement techniques are regularly reevaluated and updated to keep pace with changes in extremist behavior, and our industry welcomes opportunities to collaborate with other stakeholders to improve the safety of their services.

And Twitter said it is looking into ways to empower research into QAnon and other coordinated harmful activity on the platform, as well as focusing a significant part of its enforcement efforts on accounts engaged in ban evasion, though the company acknowledged that it has to work hard to stay ahead of bad actors in the online space.

Obviously, theres no magic wand, theres no silver bullet for how to solve this, Gallagher said. But I do think that providing people with the tools that they need to be able to find accurate information or to be able to recognize the fact that certain types of information is not reliable I think that that will go a big way, hopefully, to kind of figuring out how to get through this.

Mendelson also suggested a multipronged solution involving not only the tech industry but law enforcement, the legislature, education and community groups.

In the meantime, she warned, the grievances that were expressed on Jan. 6 are still brewing and could lead to more violence.

The retooling of QAnon in the wake of the insurrection is combined with a sort of desperation, and that desperation is very dangerous, she said. When one doesnt feel like the democratic process is working properly, when one feels their voice has been silenced, when one feels that their vote does not count that can pave the way for potentially radical action.

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Not Every QAnon Believer's an Antisemite. But There's a Lot of Overlap Between Its Adherents and Belief in a Century-Old Antisemitic Hoax - Morning...

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Posted By admin on June 29, 2021

GREENWICH History has a funny way of repeating itself.

Greenwich Education Association President Carol Sutton, a former longtime Greenwich High School social studies teacher, still recalls in the early 1990s, when her career was just beginning, the kinds of conversations that were increasingly taking place in the classroom.

The Rodney King riots had just rocked the country, bringing national attention to the problem of police brutality and reigniting racial tensions that had been dormant.

It was around that time that Sutton and other teachers founded the schools Diversity Awareness Club and began partnering with the Anti-Defamation League, an attempt to bring more multicultural understanding to Greenwich High. Sutton was teaching books like Savage Inequalities: Children in Americas Schools, about wealth and racial inequalities in public schools across the country.

At the time, administrators didnt think twice about such initiatives or such readings, Sutton said, and complaints from parents were non-existent.

But now, as the conversation around diversity and racism in schools has reignited in the last year, following the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the same or similar ideas are being cast by some as new, dangerous threats not just to education, but to America.

Its really interesting because so many of the claims being made, that this is all new all these like big initiatives about diversity, all the teaching about race as the recontextualization of history, Sutton said. But some version of this has been going on since the 90s.

The recent outrage over the supposed teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) a controversial academic framework with which to view race and power structures in American history in schools is one example of the ways in which teaching has changed in Suttons 30-plus year career, which is now coming to an end.

Sutton recently retired as head of the union representing Greenwich teachers, a position she held for eight years. And shes doing so at a contentious time within the district.

Sutton, who speaks at nearly every Board of Education meeting, was booed during her last public comment by parents protesting CRT and a host of other issues. And teachers already bearing the burden of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, find themselves increasingly under scrutiny from parents as they attempt to address past and present American racism in the classroom.

It adds an unwelcome struggle onto a year of struggle, Sutton said. Nobody in the public schools needs this right now. And they (the protesters) dont care.

Sutton was born and raised in Norwalk, where she still lives with her husband, Chris, though they are planning a move to Maine to be closer to family. She graduated from Brien McMahon High School and got her bachelors degree from Williams College, in Massachusetts.

Her first foray into teaching came in the early 1980s. Suttons father was an educator and she followed in his footsteps, beginning as a substitute in Darien Public Schools. Substituting soon turned into full-time work.

I really found my passion, Sutton said.

After Darien came the former Stamford Catholic High School. Then, she saw an opening in the Greenwich Public School district.

Since 1987, Sutton has taught in Greenwich. All of those years except for one teaching at what was then called Western Junior High School shes spent teaching social studies at Greenwich High.

And for the last eight years, shes been head of the GEA, a full-time, non-classroom position, with a salary paid by teachers dues. Lillian Perone, a former GEA president, has been elected to fill the vacancy left by Sutton.

In her more than 30 years as an educator, Sutton has witnessed a profession constantly in flux.

The job of teaching has become more demanding, Sutton said. Technology has both aided educational opportunities and made teaching a round-the-clock endeavor. And parents have been increasingly involved in what their children are learning in the classroom.

I would say that my eight years in office has been a time when teachers feel like theyre working as hard as they can, and running as fast as they can, and are still not able to keep up, Sutton said. And that wasnt always the case.

This is true of administrators and superintendents, Sutton said,

Theres a laser focus on every dollar, Sutton said. Superintendents are increasingly responsible for managing the dollars, rather than managing the system of education.

In her eights years heading the GEA, there have been five superintendents.

When theres a lot of turnover at the top, its hard on teachers, because ideas and programs dont get a chance to stick when theres an interim superintendent or an interim principal, Sutton said. Theres a little bit of feeling like you have whiplash.

Sutton does feel theres some stability in the superintendent role currently. The Board of Education voted in May to extend Toni Jones contract through the 2023-24 school year, which gives the district a real shot at accomplishing longer-term goals, Sutton said.

Special education, for example, is an area that has plagued the district for much of Suttons tenure. The district recently received a report based on a comprehensive audit of the department, which offered a litany of recommendations for improvement.

I am optimistic that stable leadership in the superintendents office will give this special education report the chance it needs to bear fruit, Sutton said. And with a new superintendent who wants to be here for a while, this may be the best chance the district has for for addressing what has been has been a problem for years.

Over the span of her career, right up to her retirement, one thing has remained constant: the sense of unity among Greenwich teachers.

Teachers got a job in Greenwich and stayed in Greenwich because of the collegiality among the teachers, the support that teachers have for each other, professionally, personally, Sutton said. Its remarkable. Im not sure that exists everywhere. If you ask teachers why they stay in Greenwich, theyll first say its because of the students. Thats what all teachers say. But I believe strongly what they would say next is its because of my colleagues.

justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586

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Retiring Greenwich educator reflects on 30-year career: 'I really found my passion' - Greenwich Time

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