Last Tuesday, on Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day), I debated an American supporter of Likud in front of 200 students at the Kushner Academy yeshiva high school in Livingston, New Jersey. Everyone — including my opponent — was polite and friendly, and the teachers repeatedly exhorted the students to be civil and open to hearing a view they may disagree with. Three boys came up to me after to shake my hand and tell me that they were perhaps the only “liberals” in the school.

Although personable, my opponent was loose in his interpretations and misinformed on relevant events in Palestinian-Israeli relations. He even referred to the Boston Marathon bombing of the previous day, before we knew anything about the perpetrators, as if this were relevant to our debate. I don’t recall his exact words, but he insinuated that it proved how violent and undependable “they” are — by which he must have meant Muslims, Arabs and/or Palestinians.

Such generalizations are wrong, of course, but the extremist Jihadi script is out there; sadly, this constitutes a distinct behavioral model for disaffected and maladjusted individuals to embrace for meaning in their lives. From what we know of the Tsarnaev brothers, this seems to be true of the older brother, with the younger pushed along by the overpowering force of the older’s personality. I’m impressed with J. J. Goldberg’s thoughtful piece on this in The Forward, “The Deadly Identity Crisis Along Islam’s Borders.”

Salomon's self-portrait

Sunday, April 7, marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. This solemn day is commemorated annually by Jews around the world, recalling that from June 1941 until the end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945, one-third of the world’s Jewish population perished in a systematic campaign of annihilation. But instead of acknowledging the impact of this mammoth horror on why most Jews support Israel as a Jewish state, many critics and opponents of Israel today denigrate this connection, with some even denying or downplaying the reality or magnitude of the Holocaust.

Surprisingly, much about this history remains to be learned. A recent NY Times article tells us that researchers have discovered evidence of “42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe,” rather than 7,000 sites thought previously to comprise this world of enslavement and genocide.

Suskind & daughter

In another few years there will be virtually no living witnesses. “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Schindler’s List” are iconic portrayals, but many more dramas transpired as well. It shouldn’t surprise us that literary and cinematic remembrances still proliferate.

The life and death of a 26 year-old artist, Charlotte Salomon, reminds us of Anne Frank. Although not a diarist, Salomon documented her family background in Germany and her life as a refugee in vivid color paintings (known as gouaches), framed with bits of narration akin to a graphic novel, presented as if an illustrated script for an opera representing her life, replete with stage directions and musical suggestions. (Her stepmother had been an opera singer.) Real-life characters are given different names, and some plot elements may have been invented, but the basic narrative of “Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music“ encapsulates Salomon’s life. Opinions differ as to whether she had a romance with her stepmother’s voice coach, as her work suggests, or if an infatuated young woman let her imagination take flight.

And just as there are by now thousands of survivors and descendants of people saved by Oskar Schindler, there are a similarly large number of Jews who owe their lives to the ingenuity and heroism of Walter Suskind. But this Jewish Schindler, his wife and young daughter all perished.

I’ve signed this petition, as have a wide array of public figures, artists and academics from across the political spectrum and of a variety of faiths — including such accomplished historians as Israel’s Yehuda Bauer, Canada’s Irving Abella, and David S. Wyman in the U.S. Israel’s initial welcome reception of African refugees has become unwelcoming and even ugly, as their numbers have grown precipitously. I begin with a note from Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, who initiated this petition (email him or contact the Wyman Institute to add your name):

As you know, Israel has been at the center of international controversy over its handling of African refugees who have been arriving at its border.

The interfaith petition below is intended to be signed by religious leaders of all faiths, scholars in all fields, organizational leaders, and political and cultural figures from around the world–we seek a broad cross-section of distinguished individuals to demonstrate the breadth of support for this effort. Once we have a sufficiently large and impressive body of signatories, we will present it to individual governments and press for its adoption.

The Hebrew University-Hadassah Genocide Prevention Program, and the Israeli Association to Combat Genocide, have endorsed this initiative. Would you do us the honor of allowing your name to be added to the list below?

With all best wishes,

Rafael Medoff, rafaelmedoff@aol.com

THE EVIAN DECLARATION
Israel and the African Refugee Crisis:
A WORLD SOLUTION FOR A WORLD PROBLEM

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual awards last night, better known as the Academy Awards or Oscars (as if you didn’t know).

First of all, given my special concern for Israel, it was too bad that neither “5 Broken Cameras” nor “The Gatekeepers” won in the documentary category, but I had expected that they’d knock each other out in the ballot. Both are great in their way, and I’d have a hard time picking between them. If anything, “Cameras” and “Gatekeepers” complement each other, with the first focusing on Palestinians and the latter on Israelis. I haven’t seen “Searching for Sugar Man” (the winner), but it didn’t surprise me that it would win, as it was the only one of the five documentary nominees that was about a phenomenon rather than an issue; the other two contenders were about the AIDS epidemic and sexual abuse of women in the U.S. military.

As for the biggies, I liked “Argo” but would have preferred “Lincoln” or “Les Miserables” for best picture. The latter has a score and presents themes of love and revolution that stir me every time, and I was very pleased to see Anne Hathaway come away as Best Supporting Actress for a role, albeit brief, that was unforgettable. I would have been even happier if there had been a tie vote with Helen Hunt for her outstanding work in “The Sessions” (something that happened in one Oscar category); by the way, that movie’s star, John Hawkes, was robbed of a nomination for Best Actor.

I like the way that The Jewish Daily Forward has edited my new film review, “Australia’s Oscar Entry Revisits German Past,” posted earlier today at its Arty Semite blog. The Forward has given me permission to post the following version, which provides some additional detail:

To Grandmother’s House They Go

Courtesy of Music Box Films

The movie title, “Lore,” refers to the eponymous strong-willed but idealistic teenager who tries to lead her four young siblings to safety at their grandmother’s house, through the lawless, war-ravaged landscape of a German nation totally defeated in 1945. Her physical trek triggers an inner journey of an impressionable young person on the edge of adulthood who suddenly confronts a brutal reality denied her previously by die-hard Nazi parents. We gradually see her shed the Nazi faith she grew up with, and recoil against the ugly hatefulness of the people around her.

Lore, short for Hannelore, is played by Saskia Rosendahl, a striking young actress. Her co-star is Kai Malina (as Thomas), a rising young actor in German television and movies after starring in “The White Ribbon” in 2009.

After rousing them in the night from their large comfortable home and setting incriminating files alight, their uniformed father transports the family in an army truck to a farm in the countryside, and then leaves them, ostensibly to return to the front. His crimes are basically left to the viewer’s imagination, but after Germany’s defeat becomes official, the distraught chain-smoking mother packs her bag and instructs Lore to take the family’s remaining money and jewelry to get the children to “Omi” (grandma) near Hamburg. She then dons a smart blue outfit and proceeds on foot to give herself up to the American occupation authorities.

My review of “Yossi and Jagger” was published in the New Jersey Jewish News issue dated April 24, 2004. My piece on its sequel, “Yossi,” has been published in the current issue of this same newspaper. The main character in both, Yossi, played by the same actor, has changed his status in life from being a junior infantry officer who loses his lover, Lior Jagger, in combat in Lebanon, to a career as a cardiologist in a Tel Aviv hospital. But he has not yet moved beyond his grief. He remains deeply depressed.

And while Israeli society has changed to the point that being gay is no longer as stigmatized as it was ten years before, Yossi Gutman, M. D., has still not emerged from the proverbial closet. The NY Times reviewer, Stephen Holden, expressed incredulity that Yossi’s young new love would be so open about his sexuality and so accepted by his boisterously straight army buddies. But since the filmmaker is Eytan Fox, a gay Israeli who generally explores this reality in his films, who are we to doubt it?

Group photo with "My heart is on the left" Meretz T-shirts; Shani Chabansky is front & center; Theo Bikel stands at the back, right.

Here we are on the week-long “Israel Symposium” of Partners for Progressive Israel in late October, with Shani Chabansky — then still a Tikkun intern — who blogged on our trip here. Symposium participants were an impressive bunch, including: five university academics (two historians, one philosopher, a journalist, and an astronomer), an internationally celebrated singer & actor (our board chair, Theodore Bikel), a retired school principal, and a very impressive graduate student in international relations.

We were primarily guests of the Meretz party in Israel, but for one day, we were hosted by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO in Ramallah. It was there that the veteran PLO official and Geneva Accord peace activist Yasser Abed Rabbo confirmed Bernard Avishai’s account of how close the Abbas-Olmert negotiations came to peace in 2008-’09 (see Avishai’s article in the December 2011 issue of Harper’s, and his earlier piece in the New York Times Magazine, February 11th, 2011). Along with the legal difficulties that forced Ehud Olmert’s resignation, the war in Gaza cut short a promising effort, as Olmert’s government chose not to attend what was meant to be a concluding round of talks scheduled by George W. Bush and Secretary of State Rice during the closing weeks of his presidency. Rabbo indicated that the P.A. planned to send negotiators to Washington, D.C. for a meeting set to begin Jan. 6, 2009, even in the midst of what we now need to regard as the first Gaza war.

Forgive me if I seem egocentric here. My sister has lived in Connecticut most of her adult life, where her husband is a recently retired math professor at the University of Connecticut. Her home is in Storrs, where UConn has its main campus, in the northeastern corner of the state, at least a two-hour drive from the scene of the school massacre in Newtown, CT. She’s informed me that she met one of the victims once, because she was a family friend of a UConn colleague. This victim was the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56 years of age.

I also recall that I had a similarly remote connection to one of the victims of the attack on Mumbai, India in 2008, again through my sister. Her oldest son had a colleague, an Indian-American, who was murdered by the Islamist terrorists because he was discovered to be a U.S. citizen.

What’s that notion of all of us being connected within just a few degrees of separation? Regardless, anyone with a modicum of human feeling will be moved by such terrible events.

I know, as discussed on this blog, that we need to wrestle with more profound cultural changes than passing some laws or regulations. But I dearly hope that this time, this horror provides enough momentum to outlaw assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. We may not yet be able to win the battle to outlaw all handguns — pistols actually take many more lives than rapid-fire assault weapons — but we can make progress on that front as well.

Today, Partners for Progressive Israel, an official American-Zionist organization formerly known as Meretz USA, has issued the following statement:

November 27, 2012

Partners for Progressive Israel strongly endorses the application of Palestine to be accorded Non-Member Observer State status at the United Nations and calls on Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to do so as well.

As a longstanding member of the American Zionist movement and as an organization that traces its roots to the days of Israel’s creation, we regard the Palestinian application as a vital step forward towards a durable, just, comprehensive, negotiated two-state peace, which is the only way to secure Israel’s existence as a democratic, Jewish-majority state.

The recent violence between Israel and Hamas-led Gaza has underscored that any attempt to ignore the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and any effort to indefinitely maintain the status quo of ‘manageable Occupation’ and ‘low-intensity conflict’ – as Israel’s current government seems inclined – is dangerous folly that is certain to exact a growing price in suffering and death on both sides.

Two Palestinian groups are vying for dominance of the Palestinian national movement: The Islamist Hamas, which controls Gaza, condones the targeting of civilians, and does not accept Israel’s fundamental legitimacy. And the Fatah-led PLO, the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has endorsed the two-state solution, rejected violence and terrorism, rejected efforts to delegitimize Israel, and is preparing his people for the difficult, but necessary, concessions that a peace agreement will entail.

At this crucial juncture, it is the obligation of the international community, including Israel’s greatest ally, the United States of America, to make sure that the strategy of coexistence and moderation is rewarded, and that the Palestinian people are offered a horizon in which they are able to realize a viable, contiguous, independent state alongside Israel not through guns and bombs, but via the tools of statecraft and diplomacy.

“The Flat” (Hadira) is so compelling that I couldn’t refuse when invited to meet this award-winning documentary film’s creator, Arnon Goldfinger, even as I prepare for my departure for Israel at the end of this week. It is clever and engaging, with light moments that flow naturally into what turns out to be a heavy and mysterious theme.

The story begins almost exactly like another recent but very different Israeli Holocaust-related documentary, “Six Million and One,” with unexpected discoveries as family members clean out the Tel Aviv apartments of a recently deceased parent (in “Six Million…”) and of a 98 year-old grandmother (in “The Flat”). Filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger discovers clippings of a series of articles published in a Nazi newspaper in 1934 Germany, which provides a glowing account of a high-ranking Nazi official visiting Palestine, accompanied by none other than his own grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler. His grandfather was a Zionist representative who guided Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, an S.S. and S.D. (Nazi intelligence agency) bureaucrat on what resembled a typical tourist excursion to Palestine, along with their respective wives, seeming from the photographs to be thoroughly enjoying each other’s company. Mildenstein headed the Nazis’ “Jewish Affairs Department” and recruited Eichmann, who eventually succeeded him as its head. During his 1961 trial in Israel, Eichmann confirmed this on camera, and the fact that Mildenstein formulated the pre-war Nazi strategy to pressure its Jewish population to leave.

Kurt & Gerda Tuchler

In Goldfinger’s follow-up investigation, he locates Mildenstein’s daughter, Eda, in Germany, and discovers that the Tuchlers maintained a friendship with her family through the 1930s and (astonishingly) after the war. The Midlensteins amiably saw the Jewish couple off at dockside when they emigrated to Palestine in 1936. Even the dark fact, which the filmmaker discovers on camera, that his great-grandmother (his grandmother’s mother) was deported and perished in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, does not prevent their renewed friendship.

Gerda Tuchler’s mother, Suzanna, had refused to leave her German home until it was too late. As Goldfinger explained to me, she changed her mind after the great pogrom known as Kristalnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, but was stymied by the British who refused to give her an entry certificate to Palestine—apparently due to the severe limitations placed on Jewish immigration in conformity with their 1939 White Paper.