Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

It happened again. As war raged between Hamas and Israel over there in the Middle East, we watched in horror as American Jews were beaten right here in American streets. Thursday evening a gang of men beat a Jewish man in Midtown. On Tuesday, a gang attacked Jewish diners at a sushi restaurant in L.A. Synagogues were vandalized in Skokie, Tucson, and Salt Lake.

I say again, because we must not forget the wave of anti-Semitic violence before the pandemic. In late 2019 and early 2020, attackers beat Jewish Americans repeatedly. The violence culminated in a mass shooting at a Kosher Deli in Jersey City and a machete attack on a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York. For the first time in their lives, friends of mine were afraid to be publicly Jewish, to walk outside wearing distinctive clothing that identified their faith.

I want to address why these attacks hurt our nation so muchreasons which echo beyond the simple evil of the assaults themselves. The reasons reach back to the beginning, to the battle over the fundamental character of the country the founders created.

Our public debate has been marked by sharp disagreement over two related questions. First, is the United States of America fundamentally a nation or an idea? And second, is the true character of our nation expressed more by the events of 1619when the first slaves arrived on American shoresor 1776, when the Founding Fathers signed their name to a declaration that said all men are created equal?

The answer to those questions is nuanced. The United States of America is a nation whose greatness (and perhaps continued existence) depends on an idea. And the story of the nation is the story of the battle between the grim realities and systems of 1619 and the virtuous aspirations and emerging movements of 1776.

When the first European settlers arrived on the eastern seaboard, they arrived both as persecuted (think of the Pilgrims fleeing English religious intolerance) and persecutors (the slavers who trafficked in human lives). The advent of slavery on our shoresand the early brutal conflicts with Native Americanssignaled that the new world was very much like the old world. The same systems of oppression were imported to new lands.

Who should be surprised? As Ive written before, tyranny was long the default form of human government. It was a violent and authoritarian expression of mankinds fallen nature. G.K. Chesterton said it well. Original sin is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

In many ways, however, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution represented an effort to fight back against mans fallen natureby creating a Constitution designed to protect human dignity and to block despots from dominating the land.

But we all know the history. The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. The first president elected under the new Constitution owned slaves. The cynic would look at this reality and declare the founding a farce. The ideals were a lie as soon as the words hit the page.

Yet those words were not a farce. They were not a lie. They were a hope, andcriticallythey were a start.

And that brings us to American Jews. In many ways, the concrete expansion of American liberty beyond the ruling class of white (mainly) Protestant landowning men began with a touching exchange between our first president and the Congregation Yeshuat Israel in Newport, Rhode Island.

On August 17, 1790 the congregation wrote Washington a letter that was presented to Washington the next day, when he visited the town and when Christian clergy also delivered a message. Its a marvelous artifact of 18th century communication. After a brief salutation, it begins with a statement of affection for the president:

With pleasure we reflect on those daysthose days of difficulty, & danger when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, shielded your head in the day of battle: and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.

The rest of the letter is presented not as a plea for liberty, but rather a recognition of the founding values. We now, the congregation wrote, behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the Peoplea Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistancebut generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.

Thats the text. The subtext, however, is plain. Members of this religious minority, hounded and persecuted across the globe, were seeking assurance. When they gave thanks for all the Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration, they were both acknowledging their present liberty and expressing a hope for an enduring home.

Washington answered with one of the new nations first concrete expressions that American religious freedom extended explicitly beyond the bounds of the Christian faith. All possess alike, he wrote, liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. His closing was powerful and important.

May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

The key wordsevery one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtreeare taken from the book of Micah, chapter four. Theyre a beautiful expression of peaceful flourishing in a pluralistic society. Washington referred to that verse almost 50 times in his correspondence. Lin Manuel-Miranda made them famous again by repeating them in the musical Hamilton.

It is no coincidence that the United States is home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world. The presence of a thriving Jewish community is evidence that American aspirations could become reality. Jewish safety and security is thus deeply rooted in the American founding. Its part of our nations origin story.

But its hard to think of a greater contradiction of the principles of Micah 4:4 and of Washingtons hope that Jews would enjoy the good will of Americas inhabitants than brutal attacks in the street, inflicted solely on the basis of faith.

Indeed, street attacks represent a larger marker of exclusion and persecution. How many times have we seen that nightmare become a recent reality, and not just for Jews? Its still hard to wrap ones mind around the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man who was chased through Georgia streets, cornered, and killed.

Weve seen Asian American men and women assaulted, unprovoked, in broad daylight, including a notorious incident when a man beat an elderly Asian American woman as bystanders merely watched.

Compounding the pain and injustice is a partisan fact: All too many people care more about crimes and hurt more for victims when those crimes and those victims promote partisan interests and advance partisan narratives. One of the great tragedies of anti-Semitism is that its found in extremist movements from left to right. Hatred of Jews is so embedded in a variety of even opposing factions that you often cant begin to presume the faction of the assailant when a Jewish man or woman is beaten in the street, shot in a deli, or knifed in a house.

This much we know, however: If the founding pledge of safety and freedom for Jewish citizens was a leading indicator that the American promise would be kept, then rising danger to Jewish citizens should be cause for profound alarm.

Our nations first president told believers in one of the worlds most persecuted religions that they would have a home in this land. That founding promise helped define this nation. Breaking that promise would define us again, but in an entirely different way. America cannot be America when Jews are beaten in the streets.

One last thing

I sat across from Jonathan McReynolds at a dinner on Friday night, and after dinner he sang this song. Its a great song for a time of rage, anger, and conspiracy. Its honest and ultimately humbling. Give it a listen:

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Can America Be America When Jews Are Beaten in the Streets? - The Dispatch

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

The last time June Beallor saw the Auschwitz survivor Irene Zisblatt, they watched Sex and the City together. That was 20 years ago.

Beallor is one of the producers behind The Last Days, the Oscar-winning 1998 documentary executive-produced by Steven Spielberg about the Hungarian Jewish experience during the Holocaust, which has now been remastered and re-released on Netflix. Zisblatt, who escaped from Auschwitz as a teen, is one of the films subjects. The 91-year-old is also a big fan of Sex and the City. Her favourite character is Carrie Bradshaw, the fashion columnist played by Sarah Jessica Parker, because she was always looking for the next thing.

On a Zoom call with the Guardian, they reminisce about that get-together at Beallors California home. She was hosting a reunion for the people involved with The Last Days. The director, James Moll, missed the festivities because he was out of town filming. But fellow Holocaust survivors Bill Basch, Alice Lok Cahana and Renee Firestone and the associate producers Bonnie Samotin and Elyse Katz all attended the poolside gathering, which took place on a Sunday.

Beallor recalled one of the producers mentioning in hushed tones that the latest Sex and the City was about to come on, thinking they couldnt possibly get away with sneaking in the episode with present company. But then Zisblatt and her cohort flipped around enthusiastically. They were like, Wait a minute, we know about Sex and the City, says Beallor. And thats how the group ended up enjoying an episode of Carries next thing together.

This isnt how I expected to start the conversation with the people behind a Holocaust documentary. But these moments of levity appear common with this group. They also feel necessary.

You need it when the subject matter is so heavy, says Moll, who joins Beallor, Zisblatt and the latters daughter Robin Mermelstein in the conversation on the occasion of The Last Days restoration and global streaming release.

The documentary focuses on the Hungarian Jews who were targeted by the Nazis during the final stages of the Holocaust. As the Nazis were losing the second world war, they redirected more resources towards completing their Final Solution. The films thesis is that the Nazis were so fueled by hatred that they would sacrifice their position in the war in order to carry out the genocide, deporting 438,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz within a six-week period. Survivors Zisblatt, Basch, Cahana, Firestone and the late Democratic politician Tom Lantos recount on camera their own ordeals from this period in horrifying and heartbreaking detail.

The Last Days was produced by the Shoah Foundation, founded by Spielberg in 1994 following the response to Schindlers List, his monumental film about Oskar Schindlers work to rescue Jews from concentration camps. When Schindlers List won best picture at the Oscars, Spielberg made a plea in his acceptance speech. He asked educators to teach the Holocaust in schools and utilize the voices of the survivors, who until then were encouraged to put the trauma behind them.

[Schindlers List] was a catalyst, says Beallor. She explains that in telling the story of the Holocaust, Spielberg built trust among survivors who felt they could finally open up about their experiences and be heard. As the founding executive directors of the Shoah Foundation, Beallor and Moll were tasked with collecting testimonies from more than 50,000 survivors who committed their stories to the digital archive for safekeeping.

Once word got out that the Shoah Foundation existed, Moll continues, the phones were ringing off the hook with survivors wanting to tell their stories.

Zisblatt was among those who gave testimony immediately after Schindlers Lists release, though she says she has only seen bits and pieces of Spielbergs film. There are things that I just cant handle, she says from her Florida home.

Zisblatt was 13 years old when she arrived in Auschwitz in 1944. Before being separated from her family for ever, her mother gave Zisblatt four diamonds to hold on to until she could exchange them for bread. Because nowhere was safe, Zisblatt would swallow the diamonds, retrieve them from her own waste, clean them off and repeat that cycle. She describes that ordeal and more in The Last Days. In her book, The Fifth Diamond, she also writes about enduring Dr Josef Mengeles experiments during her time in Auschwitz.

Zisblatt is wearing the four diamonds during the Zoom call. Theyre housed in a pendant that hangs from her neck. She only wears the diamonds when educating about the Holocaust, which she does often. Zisblatt speaks at schools, colleges and on frequents trips to Poland for the March of the Living, an educational program that brings students from around the world to Auschwitz on Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day.

She has published a version of The Fifth Diamond suitable for younger readers and developed a study guide to make it easier for educators to teach it to kids.

I want them to feel proud of who they are, grateful for what they have and protect our future, says Zisblatt, describing what motivates her. She says she has a meeting set up with four senators who are advocating to make Holocaust education mandatory in schools across the US. Our generation had failed to find the tools to stop genocide. But [the next generation] have a chance to do that.

A new generation will probably discover The Last Days, as its released in 33 languages on Netflix worldwide. Until now it has only been available on DVD.

Its going to be very interesting to see how the film plays for todays audience, says Moll, who has been trying to restore the film for years.

Beallor and Moll consider how the film will speak to the recent rise in antisemitism and xenophobia in the US, and the education people have been receiving about micro-aggressions and systemic racism from the #BlackLivesMatter movement. But I wonder how the film will speak to the crisis between Israelis and Palestinians.

On the morning were discussing The Last Days, the Guardian was reporting that eight children were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City. The war between the state and Hamas continues to escalate after Israeli forces began removing Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalems Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.

Theres so many things going on in the world today that are born from hatred and fear, says Moll. The Holocaust definitely shows the dark side of what human beings are capable of.

I dont like to be overly political, Moll continues. I dont want to hit anybody over the head. I want people to hear these testimonies from the survivors, from Irene, make what they will of it and process it themselves. [I] dont want to be prescriptive about that.

Zisblatt volunteers a response. She returns to a moment depicted in The Last Days, when she and her daughter visit her old Hungarian village more than 50 years after the Holocaust. They meet with old neighbours and friends, some of whom worry that Zisblatt has returned to reclaim her familys property, which they bought after the Holocaust. Theyre defensive about their claim to land that Zisblatt wasnt interested in.

Zisblatt reveals an upsetting detail that isnt in the film. During that visit, one of her childhood friends looked at her family and remarked: Hitler left enough of you to reproduce. Moll and Beallor are hearing that exchange for the first time.

I didnt want to share that with you because I didnt want the world to know that there is still so much hatred in my own town, Zisblatt explains to the film-makers. I didnt want the world to see how much hatred is still going on, after all of this suffering.

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There is still so much hatred: looking back on Holocaust documentary The Last Days - The Guardian

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

By Charles Mathewes, Ph.D., University of VirginiaThe rabbis believe that evil is a challenge that must be faced on a daily basis. (Image: greiss design/Shutterstock)Facing Evil as a Challenge to Be Overcome

Evil should be faced as a challenge whose successful overcoming on a daily basis will strengthen and deepen the person in their wisdom and their faith. The conviction the rabbis had that governed their philosophy was that evil in this sense was a challenge and a gift sent by God to mature humans in certain ways, not entirely unlike Irenaeus.

This is part of a larger understanding of the nature of Jewish suffering that the rabbis held to. Evil would serve as a challenge to people, but it would not overwhelm the people of Israel. In particular, the Jewish people would suffer repeated persecutions but, they thought, such persecutions would never become so extreme as to threaten the peoples existence.

This is a transcript from the video series Why Evil Exists. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

In seeing all this, what can really be seen is one rich and profound challenge to an over-Christianized conception of evil in light of sin. Even secular people today have a fairly thoroughly Christian conception of evil and sin; but they dont have to, there are other viable and plausible accounts out there.

And there are interestingly non-Christian, non-religious ways of conceiving evil; ways that make evil less melodramatic and more ordinary in a way parallel to the Rabbinic account as well. But this Rabbinic tradition offers a very sober religious view of malice. Its, again, profoundly non-dramatic. It doesnt play into any attempt to over-dramatize the struggles people have, which would, in a certain way, reinforce egotism.

Evil, even though it is not dramatic, it is a powerful, mundane, and worldly realitytheres no Satan of any kind of vast metaphysical density herebut theres a realism about how evil can, over time, come to shape, grip, and powerfully wrap someones inner soul.

Learn more about post-WWII Jewish thought on evil.

Indeed, some Jewish scholars think its inappropriate to call this a picture of evil at all. These thinkers argue that Rabbinic Judaism doesnt have a picture of evil, it just has a picture of badness. The category of evil itself, they say, already rhetorically gives the game away to Christianity.

Instead, the ra, the yetzer ha-ra, should be thought of as an impulse to badness, not an impulse to evil. This tradition emphasizes human responsibility and struggle, and especially struggle in living according to the Halakha, to Jewish law, in order to govern human behavior.

In this halakhic view, suffering, then, is kept within human dimensions. Jewish law teaches that suffering and evil is a human issuea challenge that humans deal with and that they must struggle to overcome. Again, this is in contrast to Christianity where suffering always threatens to overwhelm a creatures capacities to resist it; suffering always threatens to become a theological problem, and divine reality.

Learn more about the enlightenment and its discontents.

From a Rabbinic Jewish perspective, evil in Christianity always threatens to become melodrama, and it always seems to want to escape individual responsibility. Rabbinic Judaism believes thats a very large-scale way of evading the real moral challenges that are faced.

Admittedly, they say, not all evil may thus be understandablesometimes psychopaths happenbut in general, the shape of human evil is such, the rabbis thought, that it can be confronted through the practices of Halakha and the behavior of traditional Jewish religious practice.

Learn more about Freudthe death drive and the inexplicable.

The account of evil is not without its own problems, especially, for Jews living today after the Holocaust, the Shoah. The problem here is simply put: is this picture of evil too mundane and too ordinary to handle the Shoah? Ironically, the Shoah may seem to be something that threatens any account of evil that is not vastly dramatic.

The evil for the rabbis is about greed, jealously, and envy. This is a happy and relatively small-scale picture of evil.

Its a picture of evil based on the context of nasty, brutal people but not really continuous with the evil that was experienced in the Holocaust.

That kind of evil seems completely out of proportion to the character of the moral challenges that an ordinary person in an ordinary town in the eighth century somewhere in Mesopotamia, Palestine, North Africa, or any of the diasporic Jewish communities might have faced. Nothing like the challenge or evil of industrialized slaughter represented by the Holocaust.

Learn more about the Hebrew Bible and wisdom and the fear of God.

After the Holocaust, traditional Jewish understandings of evil were quite radically challenged. It seemed that the old agreement with God, the longest standing covenant between God and Gods people, had fallen apart and that the persecution of the Jews had reached beyond traditional pogroms/massacres, to become metaphysically eliminationist in character.

Somehow, God had let it happen that a people, the Germans, got it in their minds completely to annihilate the entire ethos, the entire people, of Israel. Post-Holocaust Jewish thought has struggled mightily with this challenge, and the struggle shows no signs of ceasing anytime soon. Indeed, the attempt to understand the meaning of the Shoah has been one of the most powerful inducements to Jewish thought since 1945.

According to the Halakhic conception of evil, the concepts of suffering and evil are considered human issueschallenges that humans deal with and that they must struggle to overcome.

The evil of the Holocaust could not be defined by the traditional definition of evil spoken of by rabbis, which is about greed, jealously, and envy. This is not really continuous with the evil that was experienced in the Holocaust, and after the Holocaust, traditional Jewish understandings of evil were quite radically challenged.

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The Rabbis and Their Conception of Evil as a Challenge - The Great Courses Daily News

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

Jacques Derrida spoke of people who have the bread of apocalypse in their mouths. These are the people formed by history haunted by history, as Derrida would have seen it.

History is a ghost returning over and over.

Derrida asked: "What does it mean to follow a ghost?" We are "persecuted", he said, "by the very chase we are leading ... The future comes back in advance: from the past, from the back."

This week we have been reminded of how history haunts us with the renewed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians: a conflict rooted in history and tied to identity. On one side Israelis who carry the Shoah the Hebrew word for 'catastrophe' to describe the Holocaust in their souls.

Words alone cannot capture the horror of the killing of six million Jewish people in Nazi death camps.

For Jewish people who have vowed "never again" the homeland of Israel is a haven against a world of persecution.

The Palestinians are forged by the Nakba catastrophe in Arabic when 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. People exiled longing for a homeland of their own.

This isn't to compare suffering but to say that suffering matters to those who have suffered.

I know of this. As an Indigenous person I was born into my own people's history of invasion and colonisation and our struggle to survive.

Throughout the world there are peoples whoknow a dark history. Peoples who each carry what the Polish poetCzeslaw Miloszcalled "the memory of wounds".

AP: Adel Hana

Ours is an age of identity. And as the Indian philosopher and economist,Amartya Sen,wrote at its worst, "identity can also killand killwith abandon".

Sen had seen the violence of Hindu and Muslim in his own country. "For a bewildered child," he wrote, "the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp."

Dividing ourselves, he said, puts us in boxes: it "miniaturises" us.

There is always tension in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, but recently they have intensified and this week, they erupted.

Yet it is so seductive. We seek the permanence of belonging and we cling to those with whom we share history. The pull of history, the memory of wounds, is irresistible.

Throughout our world, those who have been displaced, slaughtered, persecuted bind themselves to historical grievance.

We pit ourselves against each other: separated by race or faith or nation.

These have been the conflicts of our time. The conflicts I have reported around the world.

There are those who seek to find a common humanity yet there are others who wrap themselves in history and identity.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin speaks of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the great catastrophe of the 20th century. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan reminds his people of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Donald Trump came to power promising to make America great again. And in China, President Xi Jinping pledges to avenge the hundred years of humiliation by foreign powers.

Can we ever truly escape the past?

In his 2017 book, In Praise of Forgetting, journalist and philosopher David Rieff challenged the adage that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Rieff, who had covered the wars of the Balkans also wars of identity knew that at times we could havetoo much history. He warned that "thinking about history is far more likely to paralyse than encourage". He sayswe risk turning it into a "formula for unending grievance and vendetta".

As James Joyce someone who struggled with the weight of Ireland's tragic history wrote: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

In his Nobel laureate speech, Czeslaw Milosz said: "Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between nations."

Israelis and Palestinians are divided by their own history. What chance of a two-state solution Israel and Palestine existing side by side when the possibility of peace shatters against those hard questions of history?

What should be the borders of those states? Who owns Jerusalem? What of the holy places of both faiths? What are the rights of return of Palestinian refugees?

Watching the events of the past week, I have turned again to those writers like Milosz, who offer a light in the darkness.

In his Nobel speech, Milosz confessed that he had "felt the pull of despair, of impending doom, and reproached myself for succumbing to a nihilistic temptation".

I know that too well.

Poetry, Miloszsaid, preserved his sanity and "in a dark age, expressed a longing for the Kingdom of Peace and Justice".

It is hard to hear poetry when the bombs are falling and the rockets are firing but mercifully now there is a ceasefire and with it a hope there may yet be a chance that a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian children will not be raised with thebread of apocalypse in their mouths.

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As a ceasefire takes hold in Gaza, Israelis and Palestinians remain two peoples haunted by their own history - ABC News

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

James Moll, Founding Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, spoke about The Last Days.

The Last Days was recently remastered and released on Blu-ray last month. As of today, the Oscar-winning film is also streaming on Netflix. The film follows Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust: Bill Basch, Renee Firestone, Dario Gabbai, Congressman Tom Lantos, Alice Lok Cahana, and Irene Zisblatt. American veterans include Warren Dunn, Katsugo Kats Miho, and Dr. Paul Parks. Historians appearing in the film include Michael Berenbaum and Randolph L. Braum.

How long did it take to remaster the film and did this process get impacted by the pandemic?

James Moll: It took a while to find all of the original 35 millimeter elements and then to have them scanned and cleaned. We had to completely readjust the color for the whole movie because we went back to the negative. The whole color grading process had to take place again but it was fun. It was so interesting to go back and see from the negativea 4K scanbecause Ive seen the movie quite a few times over the years and Im seeing things Ive never seen before. Im seeing details in the background and experiencing in a different way. It did take a while but it was worth it.

I was at FotoKem, the post-production facility here in Burbank. I churned out a lot of projects over there over the years. Its always bustling with activity because FotoKem is a hub for so many TV shows and movies and nobody was there. They were very careful about Covid screening and I was tested regularly. It was only myself and the colorist in the room wearing masks. We were very, very careful but we were still able to get the job done.

In telling the stories of five Hungarian survivors how were they chosen for the film?

James Moll: Before making the film, I was one of the founding executive directors of the Shoah Foundation, an organization of videotape and archive Holocaust survivor testimonies. We had, by this time, many, many Holocaust survivor interviews in the archive. I went through and watchedI dont remember how many. Many! I watched a lot of Hungarian Holocaust survivor testimonies trying to find people who hadwell, they were telling the same story because they were all in Hungary but they had different backgrounds and different experiences. I was hoping to find with the five people together that they would be able to tell the story of someone who is in a small village versus someone whos in the big city in Budapest, a man versus a woman, trying to get different perspectives on the same story. It was a long process to choose the five survivors but ultimately, we did. We were fortunate to find five people who could so eloquently tell one story.

I have to say that the Shoah Foundation is hands-down Steven Spielbergs greatest legacyeven more than his films.

James Moll: I think he would be very happy to hear you say that. I think he would be very happy to say that. I mean, I dont want to speak for him so I dont know if he has a favorite movie or what he considers his legacy. I know that the Shoah Foundation is very important to him. In fact, when we were starting the foundation, he wasnt working on any films. He focused all of his time professionally to the Shoah Foundation and that was really impressive to see. It clearly meant a lot to him.

What were the biggest challenges in making this film?

James Moll: Well, theres a psychological toll it takes to delve so deeply into such dark subject matter. Thats always challenging. Of course, its nothing compared to what the people actually lived through. So for everything I could be feeling or thinking Im feeling during the making of the film, its really nothing compared to what people actually felt and went through during the Holocaust. Then theres the responsibility to make sure the story is being told accurately and that were really doing justice to the testimonies that the survivors are giving us. Thats always a challenge.

And then, of course, the production challenges. We shot this on film and it was 1998. Maybe we were shooting an end in 1997 with film cameras traveling all over the world. And so from a production standpoint, logistically, it was tough, too. But I wouldnt say overall, this was a challenge. At the time, I felt very honored to be working on it. I loved meeting the survivors. I love getting to know the survivors as if they were my own family members. It meant a lot to me at the time and I recognized that. I never felt like, Oh, this is a burden., this is a challenge, this is difficult, or this is work.

How did you first get an interest in the Holocaust and wanting to tell these stories?

James Moll: Well, thats a great question because youre talking to someone who grew up Catholic and really didnt have any direct connection to the Holocaust, relatives or any survivors. I was working for Steven Spielberg and I was making videos and smaller, sort of less consequential, less important things. He was finishing up making Schindlers List and he was talking about how so many survivors were asking him, when are they going to make their film and their story? They all have stories to tell and he realized that. We talked about what could be done. It really came from there.

Once we started working on the Shoah Foundation and videotaping Holocaust survivors, I started to get to know survivors, personally, and started to feel perhaps not too as much as an extent as when I made the film but when I was doing the Shoah Foundation, I did start to understand their stories as if they were my family members telling me the stories and I did have a very, very strong personal connection to them. When this opportunity came up and we said, Okay, now were going to make another documentary. This is our second documentary or thirdI cant rememberat the Shoah Foundation. At the time, I said, I want to direct this one. I feel this. I have to do this. I already had a background in filmmaking so it wasnt a stretch. I was a filmmaker. I didnt think twice about tackling a subject that was relatively new to me to be honest. Any, thats a good question. Its a much bigger answer than the one I just gave but I already know I was rambling enough so Ill stop.

How honored were you to win an Oscar for the film?

James Moll: I felt very honored to win an Oscar and to be recognized by my fellow filmmakers. I know it meant a lot to the survivors as well because it also meant that it would draw attention to the film and their stories would be out there even more. Yeah, so that was a big day. I didnt expect it even after we had been nominated but it made me very happy. Yeah, it was an honor. Thats a good way to put it.

I couldnt help but notice that youve also won an Emmy and Grammy. What do we need to do to get you a Tony?

James Moll: Well, do have an idea for a Broadway show that we can jump into? (Laughs)

Not really.

James Moll: Thats so funny that you say that because people use the term EGOT all the time now. Youd expect them to be in groups. Its like, Really? Its not enough to do what Ive doneI gotta go get that fourth one! But I dont see any path to getting the Tony at this point but you never know. I didnt expect the Grammy either. Actually, I didnt expect an Oscar either. I didnt expect an Emmy either. I didnt expect any of them. You never know.

What do you hope people take away from viewing the film?

James Moll: Everybody takes away something different. I think everybody takes away a greater understanding of what we as human beings have in usthe capability we have in usnot just for tremendous good but for tremendous bad. What were capable of doing to our fellow man. I mentioned the good as well because I think thats important. I think the film also focuses on that. It focuses on some of the positive things in their life. I remember some people didnt like the fact that the film ends with how many of these survivors were able to rebuild their lives because it said its putting a positive spin on things. I certainly didnt see it that way because they actually really did rebuild their lives and they truly want to put out there that theres a positive that can come from something really negative. But in order for that to happen, people need to acknowledge that this happened. I think that thats one thing that anyone who watches this film will come away from it with. I hope so anyway.

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James Moll talks The Last Days - Solzy at the Movies

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

There is a remarkable scene toward the end of the new documentary Final Account, a collection of eyewitness testimonies from elderly Germans and Austrians who remember the Nazi regime (and, to various degrees, were part of it).

In the sequence, a former Waffen-SS officer sits down with a group of students in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials met in 1942 to map out the parameters of the Final Solution. The officer, Hans Werk, speaks of the tremendous shame he feels for himself and his country to have orchestrated the genocide of 6 million Jews.

When Werk is challenged by a young German an anonymous right-winger obsessed with protecting the Fatherland and sick of hearing about shame from his elders the former Nazi fires back, recounting Jewish friends and neighbors of his who had assumed they were also part of the Fatherland, until they were marched off to the camps. The true Nazi ideology was not patriotism, he says, but hate.

Do not let yourselves be blinded! he shouts.

The film, which opened in movie theaters on May 21, itself has the same aim in mind.

Final Account is the result of more than a decade of interviews conducted by British documentarian Luke Holland, who discovered his Jewish heritage as a teenager upon learning that his mothers family had been murdered in the Holocaust. Holland died last year at 71, after a long battle with cancer, shortly after completing the film; it now lives as his final account, too.

There is a workmanlike quality to Final Account, which is made up almost entirely of contemporary interviews with former Nazis, in German with English subtitles, conducted mostly in cozy apartments and retirement homes.

Naturally there are many fewer eyewitnesses left alive today than there were four decades ago, when French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann interviewed scores for his landmark 10-hour documentary Shoah.

Lanzmann could talk to high-ranking SS officers, including some who oversaw the death camps. By contrast, Hollands interview subjects were largely children or teenagers at the time.

Many of the anecdotes in Hollands film revolve around the subjects joining the Hitler Youth as kids or watching their parents support the Nazi party. A few worked at the camps, or the train stations that led prisoners to them, but their own accounts seem to conveniently distance themselves from the actual murders. Some continue to deny the genocide ever took place.

These occasional denialists feel more like sideshows to the 90-minute films main goal and they might be committing a crime on camera, since both Germany and Austria have outlawed the practice of Holocaust denial.

By and large, most of the interviews in Final Account focus on the language of culpability: when (or if) ones presence within an evil regime constitutes being a perpetrator of its aims.

We didnt support the party, but we liked the uniform, one subject says, conjuring the comic images of exuberant Nazi children in Jojo Rabbit.

We didnt support the party, but we liked the uniform.

Others remember the odd yet mundane details that allowed them to build an everyday life around the atrocities taking place in their name, like a former nanny who remembers taking her employers kids to their local concentration camp to say hi to their mom at her place of work.

Holland is never seen on camera, but the fluent German speaker occasionally prods his subjects from offscreen to acknowledge their participation in crimes against humanity, much as Joshua Oppenheimer did to architects of the Indonesian genocide in The Act of Killing.

Together, Holland, Oppenheimer and Lanzmann all form an unsettling lineage of Jewish filmmakers who have felt compelled to confront genocide participants face to face on film.

Final Account doesnt have quite the same revelatory feel as its predecessors in this genre the film rarely breaks through the surfaces of its subjects accounts to dig at whatever their emotional truth might be. Maybe there isnt any: One of the overarching messages is that populations can follow hateful ideologies blindly, even blandly, if they feel acceptable enough to the masses.

But there are moments that wrestle with deeper questions.

he Wannsee scene, in which one generation of German seems incapable of passing on his personal and historical shame to the next, invokes not only the past but also the future of Holocaust memory. Their conversation is in anticipation of a world in which we have no more final accounts.

When that does happen, and there are no more eyewitnesses left, how are we to continue the lessons of Never Again? What forms of education and vigilance will keep us from becoming once again blinded to the past?

Its a question that has haunted the last century of Jewish life and, by necessity, must also haunt the next.

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

By Charles Mathewes, Ph.D., University of VirginiaRabbinic Judaism emerged out of a moment of crisis: the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the creation of the Diaspora. (Image: New Africa/Shutterstock)The Concept of Rabbinic Judaism

Rabbinic Judaism is the form of Jewish faith and practice that arose after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and the scattering of Jews, known as the Diaspora, across the Mediterranean and Near East in the following two centuries. It flourished from the third century all the way to the 20th century. In some ways, its still flourishing today.

The third century of the Common Era is effectively the era of Talmuds composition; the Talmud is the body of literature that comments and interprets the Torah, Jewish religious law, in general.

Rabbinic Jewish tradition takes the Talmud to be a text of near-scriptural authority for interpreting the Torah; indeed, the Talmud is the textual fixing in this tradition of the Oral Law in comparison to the Written Law of the Torah.

This is a transcript from the video series Why Evil Exists. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

The rabbis were the Jewish communitys teachers and ministers. They were scholars who knew the Torah very well and the debates surrounding it in the Talmud. They were effectively walking repositories of the tradition.

They understood the height of their religious duty to be the study of Torah and Talmud, the enormously complicated sets of argumentative commentaries that previous rabbis had created to understand how to live faithfully as Jews in this very complicated world.

Learn more about the Reformationthe power of evil within.

In the wake of the Shoah or Holocaust, theres been a huge wave of Jewish rethinking of the faith, but there have been events of similar existential crises in Judaism at different moments in Jewish history. One of them is the famous Babylonian Captivity where the remnants of Israel, or a large part of them, were exiled to Babylon in the sixth-century B.C.E.

Rabbinic Judaism emerges out of another one of those moments of crisis: the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the creation of the Diaspora. This was a revolution in Jewish thinking on the scale of the Shoah (Holocaust) with enormous ongoing effects.

In the Diaspora, the Jews effectively lost the Promised Land, and they lost the central ritual place of worshipping God (namely the Temple in Jerusalem). They did not return to Israel as a people for almost 2,000 years. A new kind of religion had to be built out of the rubble and the ashes of the old, and thats what the rabbis essentially did.

In terms of evil, in particular, rabbis explored a series of alternative moral psychologies of human malice; but much of their discussion centered around the evil and the good impulses in the human heart. The evil impulse is called yetzer ha-ra and the good impulse is called yetzer ha-tov.

Adam and Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of tov and ra, good and evil. The rabbis saw God creating in humans two different and rival sources of energy, inclinations, or impulses. In fact, for the rabbis, the condition of the human, as driven by these two impulses, is signified in the scriptures themselves.

Learn more about self-deception in evil-scholasticism.

Jewish people view good and evil differently than Christians. It is rooted in the idea that the behavior of good or evil is anchored in basic human impulses existing essentially from the creation.

For Christ to have been so good, something must have been awful (that he came to remedy). The Jewish conception of these two impulses suggests an entirely different picture of how humans are organized and what motivations and struggles theyre dealing with internally.

Learn more about the Hebrew Bible and human rivalry with God.

The yetzer ha-tov, the good impulse, is basically conscience; its an inner sense that alerts the person when he/she is considering violating Gods law. It warns the person, and it develops around age 1213 when the young Jewish boy or girl first begins to become an adult.

At a boys Bar Mitzvah or a girls Bat Mitzvah for example, when the child first begins to struggle with Gods word in the Torah and the observance of the Commandments, for the rabbis, that is the true mark of a maturing Jew.

In contrast to the yetzer ha-tov, the yetzer ha-rathe evil impulseis a far more murky concept. It doesnt emerge when the person is 1213, and its part of human nature. Genesis, for example, says: The yetzer of the human heart is ra from youth, The impulse of the human heart is bad from youth (Genesis 8:21).

Learn more about Hobbes and evil as a social construct.

The evil impulse is not demonic, and its not an utterly unnatural violation of creation expressing some sort of anarchic hostility to Gods creation. The rabbis believe this is a paranoid kind of self-interest. In their view, a young child or infant sees the world as a threatening and dangerous place.

For example, think about how small children react when their parents introduce them to a stranger, often theyll hide behind their parents; in other words, the rabbis have a great deal of empirical evidence they can point to. Children are sometimes terrified of strangers, and they are scared of the world, and this seems accurate as to how children behave (at least part of the time).

After the fall of Jerusalem in the first century, a different kind of Jewish tradition arose called Rabbinic Judaism. This tradition flourished from the third century onward.

According to Rabbinic Judaism, Yetzer ha-tov, or the good impulse, is an inner sense that warns people when they are considering violating Gods law. This innate sense is also known as conscience.

According to Rabbinic Judaism, the evil impulse is part of human nature (self-interest). The evil impulse is called yetzer ha-ra in the Jewish tradition.

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Rabbinic Judaism: The View of Good & Evil in the Jewish Tradition - The Great Courses Daily News

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

Eleven million men, women, and children perished during the systematic, Nazi state-sponsored persecution and murder of Jews, Slavic peoples, Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners, homosexuals, and others deemed inferior. Of those, more than six million were Jews.

The way in which one traditionally views the Holocaust is inevitably through the lens of the victim. However, director Luke Holland, driven by his own familys connection to the horrific period surrounding World War II, attempted to explore a seldom investigated narrative that of the perpetrator.

Filmed over the course of a decade, Hollands Final Account is a stirring oral history of the individual motivations, actions, and attempted justifications of those who perpetrated the Shoah, according to the USC Shoah Foundation.

Although Holland died from brain cancer last year at the age of 71, his final work remains a living testament to his lifelong desire to preserve an important narrative largely missing from the historiography of the Holocaust.

Prior to the theatrical May 21 release of Final Account, the films associate producer Sam Pope and Dr. Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, spoke with Military Times about the late directors final project and one of the last portraits of participants who served under Adolf Hitlers Final Solution.

You interviewed more than 300 people over the course of 10 years for this film. Was there a particular moment that stood out to you? Were there any that didnt make it into the film?

Smith: One piece that didnt make it into the documentary was a remarkable moment in documentary filmmaking. There was a former SS member being filmed by Luke. At one point he was asked the question about whether he was a perpetrator much like we saw in the documentary and the individual burst out in anger.

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How dare you defile the name of the Fuhrer!

He went on this tirade and was demanding that Luke turn off the camera. Luke didnt. He just sat there and watched. After a few minutes his tirade died down and the guy just sat back in his chair and started to speak about what he was involved in.

Another striking moment was when he was interviewing the stenographer who had been involved in medical experiments at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He visited her three times. He already knew on the first occasion that she had been involved in medical experiments, but he didnt disclose that to her. On the first meeting she tells him she nothing to do with it. By the time he gets to the third meeting he says to her, You know, on the second occasion, you said that your boss would go to Sachsenhausen. What did he do there? Did you ever go?

No, I was never there, she maintained.

Luke then goes, Well thats strange because I have this document that describes the medical experiments, and it seems to have your signature on it as the stenographer. Could you possibly have been there?

And she said, Oh, yeah, I would go with him and take notes.

We wouldnt have this material without Lukes ability to be able to find, talk to, and extract this remarkable information.

Pope: One of the most fascinating interviews was with Herbert Fuchs, the SS man sworn in at the Feldherrnhalle on Kristallnacht. The way he reflects in the film to the questions that Luke is asking, its almost as though he is considering them for the first time. Now, whether that is necessarily true or not is up to the audience to determine.

Since World War II, many myths have emerged of the good German, that no one knew anything, or the line, We were just following orders. How do you think Luke challenged these in this film?

Smith: I think what Luke was trying to show was that the people who committed the Holocaust were not monsters, that the people who made the decisions to join the SS or carry out their orders were human beings, and that they are human beings afterwards, too.

Those 10-year-olds who signed up to join the Hitler Youth could not have known they were joining what ultimately became a criminal organization. They were just kids wanting to be in a uniform, to be part of a peer group, and be part of something great in Germany. When you think about it in that way, I think I probably would have joined.

Thats Lukes point, that they were not so extraordinary. But weve got to be on guard, because otherwise, we might end up as 90-year-olds wondering how on earth we got ourselves into such a mess.

I will finish to say there is no excuse for their behavior. There was one gentleman in the film who said, I was a guard at Sachsenhausen, but I dont consider myself a perpetrator. But when you put it like that maybe I was.

I think thats disingenuous. They were very aware of what they were part of. I dont buy that bit of their narrative, nor should they be excused from it. But it is interesting to see, even as a 90-year-old, how he justifies how he got there, why he did what he did, and how he wasnt responsible. I think that is really instructive in terms of what were like as human beings and what we need to be on guard for.

Pope: I think these issues you raised were very much in the forefront of Lukes mind. His journey was motivated by a personal desire to understand how this could happen the murder of his own grandparents, the fact that his mother had to flee Austria to protect herself and the lives of her children. He wanted to know how much truth these myths held.

The common refrain we heard was after the war or we didnt know. Through these interviews we start to interrogate those lies. I think we start to see the fractures in this sort of monolith of myth. There is no consensus among individual narratives, and part of the film is trying to demonstrate that, even among the interviewees and perpetrators, there is not necessarily an agreement.

There is the famous quote, The only thing necessary for triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. What struck me most in the film was the mental contortions many of the subjects went through to justify their behavior. How far would you go in claiming the complicity of the German people?

Smith: I often have this conversation with colleagues, because when Im discussing this period, I talk about Germany unless Im specifically talking about something that the Nazi Party did. The reason is that it wasnt the Nazis that developed Auschwitz. It was Germany. It wasnt the Nazis that shot Jews into ditches. It was Germany. The fact that the Nazi Party was controlling Germany comes down to the fact that German citizens voted for Adolf Hitler in 1933. Hitler was appointed the chancellor of the Weimar Republic. And yes, he took over and became a dictator, but he was put there by the German population.

People tend to get a little anxious, saying, You cant blame all Germans. Im not blaming all Germans; Im saying that the country committed the crime. And therefore, the citizens of the country are responsible to apprehend those if they do not agree with it.

We have to be accountable for our actions. Its the will of the people that ultimately decides a nations fate, and if we dont like it, we better prevent it, because otherwise it will go down in history.

Pope: I was just reading through some of Lukes notes and he found himself asking this question again and again. Where does this perpetration begin? The framework through which weve tried to determine this has largely been a judicial one. We framed it through law, whether one has committed a crime. But then there is the question of complicity. Is silence tacit support?

I think it would be inaccurate to say that everyone knew the entire scope of what was being carried out in front of them. However, it became clearer and clearer during the interview process how much people did know. There was a greater awareness, and not just of anti-Semitism, criminal acts, or people being deported. News spread as men came back from the front, from the killing fields, from the sites of mass murders. Those rumors spread everywhere.

I think we must acknowledge that perhaps perpetration, not necessarily direct criminality, but perpetration begins much earlier and in more subtle ways.

How reticent were the films subjects to speak with you? Was there openness or were they less inclined to explore their own culpability after so many years?

Pope: There were many potential interviewees who decided they did not want to revisit the past. However, we found many who welcomed the opportunity. There were some who wanted to share, but perhaps didnt want to explore their own personal history.

It was interesting seeing how we always started off with childhood, when things were sort of innocent, and then they could then build. It was a matter of following those threads, allowing them to construct their past before you. Luke, being as well-researched as possible, was able to pull on those little threads.

In the film, a German medic states pointedly, What is not in the archives does not exist. The Germans were notoriously meticulous in their accounting, so for me that notion is chilling. How will Final Account bring to light some of what had been previously buried?

Smith: The missing story has been that of those who committed the crimes, and I think the genius of Final Account is the fact that it gives us a gateway into understanding what the process was for individuals who became a part of a criminal organization, and how they lived their lives.

It also gives us the entry point to the archive as a whole. We see the complexity, we see the deception, we see the disingenuous behavior, but we also get a sense of how things happened, who they became, and how it was possible.

Theres another clip not in the film but on our website of a policeman guiding traffic while Jews are walking by and going to the train station. Heres this guy who wasnt putting the Jews on the train but has becomes this eyewitness to history. Its not from the Jewish perspective of being taken to the train station. Hes a German witness. That helps us defeat denial.

A survey done last year by the Claims Conference found that there was a disturbing lack of Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z. How do you hope Final Account reaches those with little awareness of the war or genocide?

Smith: I believe when teaching about the Holocaust, knowledge is not the only indicator. Do these young people know about Hiroshima, or how many African slaves were brought to America, or what the Jim Crow laws were?

I think you have to test all of those things to see whether or not the issue is in terms of historical knowledge. I think its best taught with context, which is why the USC Shoah Foundation is involved in this film to provide context that allows someone to explore this safely. But I think its extremely instructive to be able to show that if this can happen in Germany, it can happen anywhere. So, lets learn those lessons while we can.

Pope: For younger audiences, this history can feel far removed. What I hope this film accomplishes is that it encourages people to ask the question of, When do I become a perpetrator? Have I become one in my own way? How do I spot those warning signs?

I dont expect anyone to have those answers right away, but to at least have that thought bubbling is hugely important.

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Surviving members of Hitler's Third Reich speak in chilling new documentary 'Final Account' - Military Times

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

Syracuse University has announced the election of seven new members to its Board of Trustees, all of whom are recognized leaders in their fields and are either alumni or otherwise deeply connected to the University through family and service. The new members include Sharon R. Barner 79, Michael E. Blackshear 91, Deborah A. Henretta G85, Gisele A. Marcus 89, Kenneth A. Pontarelli 92 and David M. Zaslav, and Ryan P. McNaughton 96, who will become the president of the Syracuse University Alumni Association Board on July 1, 2021 and serve a two-year term on the Board.

The board welcomes these new members who have demonstrated dedication and commitment to the mission, vision and values of the University, says Board of Trustees Chair Kathleen A. Walters 73. I am especially impressed with the breadth and depth of governance experience held by many of our new members. They bring both skills and wisdom that will help guide the board through the challenges facing higher education in these unprecedented times.

Chancellor Kent Syverud says the value brought by these diverse and distinguished professionals will help the University remain on course to achieve its strategic goals. We are truly honored to have our new members willing to commit the time and resources it takes to ensure this generation of students and the generations to come have access to an extraordinary student experience and opportunities for academic, personal and professional success, Chancellor Syverud says.

Sharon R. Barner 79

Barner has spent three decades helping global businesses in technology, automotive and life sciences, protect intellectual property and grow their businesses. She is currently vice president, chief administrative officer and corporate secretary for Cummins Inc., responsible forcommunications, marketing, government relations, compliance, facilities, security and corporate responsibility. Previously, she was vice-president, chief legal officer, dealing with strategic corporate initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory, compliance, and other risk management activities.

Prior to her work at Cummins, she was a partner in the legal practice of Foley & Lardner, helping it establish offices in Japan and China; and deputy undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office where she was responsible for articulating U.S. domestic and foreign intellectual property policies and led over 14 foreign missions to raise awareness about the impact of intellectual property on business and innovation.

Her governance experience on public and private boards includes Howmet Aerospace, Eskenazi Health Foundation, Association of Corporate Counsel, Leadership Council of Legal Diversity, and Foundation of Advancement of Diversity in IP Law.

Barner earned bachelors degrees in psychology from Syracuse Universitys College of Arts and Sciences and political science from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in 1979 and a J.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1982. She served on the Syracuse University College of Law Board of Advisors.

She is a frequent speaker on intellectual property strategies and the importance of intellectual property to business value.

She lives with her husband, Haywood McDuffie, in Carmel, Indiana. They have three children: Haywood McDuffie III 17 (College of Visual and Performing Arts) and twins Meredith and Devin.

Michael E. Blackshear 91

Blackshear has nearly three decades of experience in the areas of ethics, compliance and risk management. Currently, he serves as senior vice president, chief compliance and privacy officer for Ryan Specialty Group (RSG), an international specialty insurance organization.

Prior to RSG, he was North America chief compliance officer for Chubb Insurance Group; held various leadership roles with Marsh & McLennan Companies, focusing on compliance and government affairs; and served KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers in compliance and risk management advisory roles.

Blackshear was recognized as an influential insurance professional in Insurance Business Americas (IBA) 2021 Global 100, and in 2020 as a change agent and one of the IBA Hot 100 insurance practitioners that push the insurance industry forward in opening doors of opportunity to people of all races, ethnicities, genders, nationalities, orientations and ages.

Blackshear obtained a B.S. in finance from Syracuse Universitys Martin J. Whitman School of Management, in 1991, an MBA from St. Johns University in 1995, and a J.D. from Fordham Law School in 1999. He also received a certificate in managing ethics in organizations from Bentley College and has recently completed a certificate at Loyola University Chicago at the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leadership Institute.

Blackshear serves on Syracuse Universitys Whitman Advisory Council, the Office of Multicultural Advancement Advisory Board and the National Campaign Council. He received Syracuse Universitys Chancellors Citation in recognition of his significant career and civic achievements, and received the Annual Ruth Whitehead Whaley Award from Fordham Universitys Black Law Student Association for his prominence in the field of compliance.

He and his wife Rhonda reside in Chicago, Illinois.

Deborah A. Henretta G85

Henretta has had a distinguished career in executive leadership at global companies and is a respected thought leader on issues related to digital transformation, diversity and leadership development. She is a partner at Council Advisors (formerly G100 Companies) and vice chair of SSA & Company, where she oversees its digital transformation practice.

Henretta spent 30 years at Procter & Gamble serving as president and senior executive officer of several different lines of business: its beauty business, its e-business; its Asia business; and its baby care business. For seven consecutive years, she was listed on Fortunes U.S. and international rankings of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.

She currently serves on the boards of several public companies (American Eagle Outfitters, Corning, Meritage Homes and NiSource) and privately held SC Johnson. She is frequently included on Women Inc.s list of the 50 most powerful female board directors.

Henretta held a U.S. State Department appointment to the Business Council of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and currently has a U.S. appointment to the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council.

Henretta earned a B.A. in communications from St. Bonaventure University in 1983, and an M.A. in advertising from Syracuse Universitys S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1985. In 2010, she was awarded an honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters from St. Bonaventure University.

Henrettas Syracuse University service includes membership on the Newhouse Advisory Board.

She is married to Sean Murray and is the mother of three: Caitlin Murray G16 (who has a masters degree in multimedia, photography and design from Syracuses Newhouse School), Connor and Shannon.

Gisele A. Marcus 89

Marcus has inspired countless individuals to aspire high, beat the odds and bring along others on professional journeys. She currently serves as the chief operating officer of NPWR, a networking app being developed to help people network effectively. She recently completed a TEDx titled Networking Made Easy and speaks internationally on networking, leadership and women in the workplace.

Prior to this newest venture, Marcus held leadership roles in industry and nonprofit organizations, including Thermo Fisher Scientific, the St. Louis Regional Chamber, Cushman & Wakefield, and Johnson Controls. She has turned around departments, divisions and entire organizations by improving financial performance, enhancing operational efficiency and reversing failed relationships.

Marcus volunteer work includes being the co-chair of the International Trends and Services committee of The Archway (MO) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, delivering transformational programs to people of African ancestry globally to have a better quality of life and emerge out of poverty. As co-chair of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., Kappa Lambda Chapter $1M endowment fund, she is devoted to providing scholarship opportunities for female students with financial need. She is a trustee at Friendship West Baptist Church, chair emeritus of the Black Repertory Theatre and treasurer of Child & Family Institute.

Marcus earned a B.S. in management information systems and transportation management from Syracuse Universitys Whitman School in 1989 and an MBA from Harvard University in 1994.

She is a member of Syracuse Universitys Multicultural Advancement Advisory Council, former vice president of the Syracuse University Alumni Association and inaugural lecturer for the Universitys Sankofa Lecture Series. In 2014, Marcus received the Chancellors Citation for Excellence in Global Business Management. She also endowed an Our Time Has Come Scholarship in her name at the Whitman School of Management.

She currently resides in St. Louis, Missouri.

Kenneth A. Pontarelli 92

Pontarelli has had a distinguished career with Goldman Sachs, where he is now partner and managing director and leads the firms private equity impact investing efforts within its Asset Management Division.

Pontarelli first joined Goldman in 1992 and worked his way up from analyst to become a managing director in 2004 and a partner in 2006. He was also the chief investment officer of Goldmans West Street Energy Partners for five years.

In 2018, he founded Mission Driven Capital Partners, a New York City-based firm focused on sustainability investing, where he functioned as chief investment officer. He returned to Goldman Sachs in 2020.

During his long career in the investment industry, Pontarelli made the Forbes Top 50 Dealmakers list of private equity executives who are focused primarily on fund performance, exits and recent success in raising money. He previously served as a director of several New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) publicly traded corporations and is currently a director of several privately held businesses.

Pontarelli earned a dual B.S. degree in finance from Syracuse Universitys Whitman School and economics from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School in 1992. While at Syracuse, he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 with an MBA with distinction.

Pontarelli serves on the Whitman School Advisory Council.

He lives in New York City with his wife, Tracey Pontarelli, and their three children: Charlotte 24 (College of Visual and Performing Arts), Brody 25 (Falk College), and Tess.

David M. Zaslav

David Zaslav has led Discovery since 2007 as president and CEO, overseeing all operations for all brand platforms, including pay-TV, free-to-air, direct-to-consumer and digital. Under his leadership, Discovery began trading as a public company in 2008, became a Fortune 500 company in 2014, acquired Scripps Networks Interactive in 2018 and launched Discovery+ this year, now reaching three billion viewers worldwide. Zaslav also spearheaded the launch and growth of Discovery Impact, the companys corporate social responsibility program, including a global conservation initiative to protect the wild tiger population. On May 17, 2021, AT&T and Discovery, Inc. announced their intention to combine WarnerMedia and Discovery, bringing together media holdings including CNN, HBO, HGTV, Food Network and others. Zaslav will lead the new organization.

Prior to joining Discovery, Zaslav had a distinguished career at NBCUniversal, where he was instrumental in developing and launching CNBC and helped create MSNBC. He was previously an attorney with the New York firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae.

Zaslav serves on the boards of Sirius XM Radio Inc., Lionsgate Entertainment, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, The Cable Center, Grupo Televisa, Partnership for New York City, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Paley Center for Media and the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

He has received multiple awards for his contributions to the media industry, including the Fred Dressler Leadership Award from Syracuse Universitys Newhouse School. He was inducted into the prestigious Cable Hall of Fame in 2017 and into the Cable TV Pioneers Class of 2018.

Zaslav earned a B.S. from Binghamton University in 1982 and a J.D., with honors, from Boston University in 1985.

Zaslav lives in New York City with his wife Pam. Two of their three children are Syracuse University alumni: Alison Zaslav 14 (College of Arts and Sciences, Maxwell School and Newhouse School) and Jamie Zaslav 16 (Newhouse School). Their son, Jordon Zaslav, is a graduate of Duke University.

Ryan P. McNaughton 96

McNaughton has used his prolific communications skills and passion for fundraising to impact the lives of others and improve communities. He currently serves as vice president of government affairs for the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber, advancing public policy to promote regional economic prosperity. Previously, he was director of community relations and resource development for the Trumbull County Board of Developmental Disabilities and executive director of its Fairhaven Foundation. He also spent eight years at Kent State University, in both advancement and career services, and served as a city councilman in Niles, Ohio.

McNaughton graduated from Syracuse Universitys Newhouse School in 1996 with a B.S. degree in broadcast journalism and spent more than a dozen years in radio and television broadcasting, primarily as a sports reporter in Cleveland and Syracuse. McNaughton also earned a Master of Education degree from Westminster College (Pennsylvania) in 2011, and a Master of Arts degree in public relations from Kent State University in 2017.

McNaughton will assume the presidency of the Syracuse University Alumni Association (SUAA) on July 1, 2021. He has been on the SUAA Board of Directors since 2014, becoming vice president in 2018, and president-elect last year. In 2009, he helped to strengthen the Northeast Ohio Alumni Club and was chosen to be its president. He is a frequent presence at college fairs where he represents what it means to bleed Orange.

The Amherst, Ohio, native is married to Kristenne Robison, Ph.D., who obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 from Syracuse Universitys Maxwell School. They are the parents of two boys, Declan and Eamonn.

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Seven New Members Elected to University's Board of Trustees - Syracuse University News

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Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

This month marks Jewish American Heritage Month and the start of our year-long celebration to honor the 100th anniversary of the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey in April 2022. This is the perfect opportunity to recognize the contributions and achievements of our own South Jersey community to the Jewish American experience.

In 1922, a group of 29 people with vision and compassion for others created an organization to serve the Jews living in Camden, NJ. From those humble beginnings of an organization focused on delivering food, clothing, and shelter, we have grown and evolved into the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey and our family of agencies. We now serve the needs of tens of thousands of Jews in South Jersey, and countless more in Israel and in 70 countries worldwide. Just as the population we serve has grown, so has our focus. Our five Areas of Impact are far-reaching, providing programs, services, and enhancing Jewish life for older adults, individuals with special needs, family and youth, as well as creating global connections and community engagement.

From 1989-1999, our community and our Jewish Family & Childrens Service agency helped to resettle 5,000 migrs from the Former Soviet Union to South Jersey. They were fleeing the persecution they faced as Jews in the FSU, coming to America for a new life. What they found here was the support of a whole community and the freedom to live Jewishly. Hundreds of families from our South Jersey community adopted the new families to our community, teaching them about life in America, celebrating Shabbat together, and becoming lifelong friends in the process.

In 2016, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of our Jewish Community Voice newspaper. Our Voice was the original Jewish Community Voice newspaper in the country. And while other community newspapers have adopted the name, ours remains the longest running Jewish Community Voice print newspaper in America. Today, you can read the Voice on the web, get news alerts and updates on the Voices social media channels, or sit back with a cup of coffee and read the news the old fashioned way with a printed paper in hand.

The Esther Raab Holocaust Museum & Goodwin Education Center, a program of our Jewish Community Relations Council agency, touches the hearts and minds of over 20,000 people each year, working with more than 250 schools, the juvenile justice system, and community organizations throughout South Jersey. The Center uses the lessons of the Holocaust to create critical and life-changing learning experiences that help shape our future generations so that we may never forget the atrocities of the Shoah.

In 2018, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our Jewish Community Campus at 1301 Springdale Road. For our Katz Jewish Community Center agency, those 20 years included having the honor of hosting the Maccabi Games twice, seeing 1,000 students graduate from the early childhood program, continuing the learning opportunities with lifelong learning classes for thousands of older adults each year, and engaging with more than 30,000 campers.

We have built something truly amazing here in South Jersey through the hard work and contributions of so many people over the yearsthe visionaries, the philanthropists, the volunteers, the staffand the community.

For 2021, the National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) in Philadelphia is leading the nationwide celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. NMAJH CEO Dr. Misha Galperin said, For more than 360 years, American Jews have always risen to contribute to society and culture, including science, medicine, sports, business, civil rights, government, and military service. NMAJH is working to raise awareness about those contributions and to stem the roots of antisemitism by bringing stories of American Jewish experience to life. To learn more about Jewish American Heritage Month, you can visit the NMAJH website at nmajh.org

And stay tuned as we begin planning for the 100th anniversary of our Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey. We will be sharing our favorite memories and important milestones from the last 100 years, culminating with a celebration event on Sunday, Apr. 10, 2022.

jweiss@jfedsnj.org

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Join us as we celebrate 100 amazing years of accomplishment - Jewish Community Voice

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