Jewish Current Issues

Take One Minute to Support The Lincoln Bedroom

Please take one minute to click on the video of a classic performance by The Lincoln Bedroom from its show last year in Nashville.  Every click gets the band closer to winning a trip back to South by Southwest this year.

Rep. Michele Bachmann at the RJC

Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) (“one L, two Ns”) made an extraordinarily impressive presentation last week to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Los Angeles, covering a wide variety of topics ranging from health care to taxes to terror trials.

 

She first went to Israel in 1974, at the age of 18, to live on a kibbutz, and has been to Israel four times since being elected to Congress in 2006. The following is an excerpt from a three-minute extemporaneous answer she gave to a question on the connection of Israel’s security to that of the United States:

 

. . . I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel.  It is a strong and beautiful principle.  

 

Right now in my own private Bible time, I am working through Isaiah . . . and there is continually a coming back to what God gave to Israel initially, which was the Torah and the Ten Commandments, and I have a wonderful quote from John Adams that if you will indulge me [while I find it] . . . [from his February 16, 1809 letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp]:

 

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

 

. . . So that is a very long way to answer your question, but I believe that an explicit statement from us about our support for Israel as tied to American security, we would do well to do that. 

 

Bachmann was the first Republican woman elected to Congress from Minnesota (having served in the Minnesota State Senate since 2000) and was re-elected in 2008. 

 

She holds an LLM in tax law and spent five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, owns a small mental health care practice with her husband (employing 42 people), and is one of the leading advocates in Congress for foster and adopted children (having opened her home to 23 foster children along with her five natural-born ones).

 

More on her at her website.

 

 

 

THE LINCOLN BEDROOM CD HAS BEEN RELEASED

BROKEN RECORD, the first CD of the best Jewish country-rock-indie band west of the Mississippi, was released this week. It is available at iTunes, Amazon or any reputable digital retailer, as well as at the band’s website: www.thelincolnbedroom.net. You can go there and sign up for exciting news about upcoming record release events!

Please take a minute to view a video of a classic TLB performance of "I Just Want to See Her Face Again" from the TLB show in Nashville. Every unique view gets the band closer to winning a trip back to South by Southwest in 2010!

Howard Berman on Iranian Sanctions

Americans for Peace Now (AFPN) opposes the broad-based sanctions approach against Iran that Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, favors.

 

This afternoon Berman spoke at an AFPN lunch in Los Angeles and directly responded to AFPN’s position. Berman argued his approach is the most likely peaceful means of preventing Iran from going nuclear, and that more limited sanctions that would target “leaders” in the hope of not affecting the Iranian public, would not be effective.  The video (accessible here for email subscribers) follows:

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February 1 at the Skirball -- CJHS & JCI Present Seth Lipsky on "Our Constitutional Moment"

Seth Lipsky, the legendary editor of the Forward and the New York Sun, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, and the author of the new book "The Citizen's Constitution" -- a book equally erudite and entertaining -- will be at the Skirball in Los Angeles on February 1 at 7 p.m.  RSVP here for an important evening.

More on Israel in Haiti

NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams features a report on Israeli efforts in Haiti – “how one nation came in there and set up shop almost immediately.” Two minutes worth watching (email subscribers can click here):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Israeli and Jewish Efforts in Haiti

Israeli efforts in Haiti are quite extensive and remarkable:

There are more videos and descriptions at the Israeli Foreign Ministry site.

Contributions to the Haiti Emergency Fund of the American Jewish World Service can be made here. (Hat tips Yael and Atlas).

"COMMENTARY is the one-word answer to the question 'what changed your mind?'"

Monday evening, approximately 500 people gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York for the 80th Birthday Roast of Norman Podhoretz to benefit COMMENTARY magazine.

Editor in Chief John Podhoretz was the Master of Ceremonies and the roasters included Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Roger Hertog, George Wiegel, Orson Bean, Jackie Mason, William Bennett and Henry Kissinger.

It was an elegant evening of humor, reminiscences and tributes, of which the following is only a portion of one -- the last five minutes of Bill Bennett’s roast/tribute (the video is here for email subscribers).

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Israel, History and Natural Law

At the request of JCI, the Claremont Review of Books has made the Correspondence section of its latest issue available on the web without charge, so JCI could link to the exchange at the end of the section between Harry V. Jaffa and reader Kenrick W. Hackett on “Israel and Natural Law.”  

The exchange was a result of the “Open Letter to President Obama” regarding Israel that Jaffa had published in the prior issue of the Review, which challenged Obama's characterization in his Cairo speech of the West Bank/Judea-Samaria as "occupied."  Hackett's letter in turn both challenges and supports Jaffa’s analysis, and Jaffa's response covers several historical points with a lucidity that is rare in the current discourse on Israel. 

The exchange deserves to be read in its entirety, but the following is an excerpt from Jaffa’s discussion:

For a historical perspective on Palestine we should look back upon Mark Twain's visit to the Holy Land in 1867. It was, he wrote, a land of kites and crows with virtually no signs of human civilization. This devastating blight remained unbroken until the 1890s when in the wake of Russia's pogroms Jews bought land from the Ottoman Turks, and began the incredibly toilsome task of turning an apparently unredeemable desert into the Garden of Eden it eventually became. This process, which owed nothing to the Arabs, was begun before World War I. . . .

In World War I, the Allies destroyed the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. . . .  Seeking Jewish support was a policy of the Allies even before America's entry into the war. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 must also be seen in this context.

The British made promises to both Arabs and Jews to support the war against the Ottoman Turks. The contribution of the Jewish Legion in Sir Edmund Allenby's army was certainly not less than that of the more celebrated Arab irregulars under the command of T.E. Lawrence. There has been a large literature on whether the British sufficiently honored their wartime promises. However, out of the remains of the Ottoman empire (outside Turkey) 98% has been fashioned into Arab states, among them Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Transjordan.

The last was carved out of what had become the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922, to provide another monarchy for the Hashemites. It remained Transjordan until 1948, when it crossed the Jordan and occupied the West Bank. It was originally regarded as the Arab Palestinian state, while the remainder of the Mandate was considered the Homeland of the Jews. Yet on three separate occasions this remainder was further subdivided to provide a second Arab state in what had been the Palestine Mandate. On each of these occasions the Jews accepted the subdivision but the Arabs did not.

The Holocaust has proved beyond a rational doubt the necessity of a place for persecuted Jews to find refuge. The justification of Israel goes beyond this, however. To compare Israel with the neighboring Arab states—notwithstanding the trillions of dollars of squandered oil wealth—we need to ask the Connecticut Yankee to return to King Arthur's court and remind us of the difference between our own civilization and one untouched by science and democracy, and by the laws of nature and of nature's God.

President Obama’s error in his Cairo speech was to confuse the necessity of the modern state of Israel after the Holocaust with the justification for that state, which precedes the twentieth century and both World Wars and has its roots both in biblical and modern history (as the entire Hackett-Jaffa exchange makes clear).

It is ironic that the Arabs lost far more land by trying to wage genocidal wars in 1948 and 1967 than if they had simply accepted a small state of Israel on a partial sliver of the land to which it in fact had superior claims in the entire land west of the Jordan River.

Support Anne Bayefsky

The video is a portion of Anne Bayefsky’s impassioned “J’accuse” on April 17, 2009 at the Preparatory Committee of the UN’s Durban II conference (“You could have fought racism; you chose instead to fight Jews”). Her “Eye on the UN” is an invaluable source of material on its activities.

Last month, Bayefsky was expelled from UN premises and her accreditation stripped, after a two-minute speech there criticizing a General Assembly resolution on the notorious Goldstone Report. Bayefsky noted that the resolution, while criticizing Israel, did not mention Hamas, whose thousands of missiles at Israeli towns and cities triggered the Gaza war.

Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors published an important call for action today (also published at Jewish Indy):

Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors cannot not sit silently by while the few genuine human rights advocates in the UN are silenced. Please join us in demanding support for Bayefsky’s immediate reinstatement by contacting your U.S. Representative or Senator, especially if they are members of the Committees on Foreign Relations charged with overseeing the State Department and our UN mission. Time is of the essence and we urge you to act now.

For contact information and a sample letter, go directly to this link. Please help us:

• Demand a forceful response in support of Bayefsky and in defense of free speech.

• Tell them it's unacceptable for America to sit on the sidelines while anti-American, anti-Israeli regimes decide whether our NGOs can enter the United Nations building.

• Stress that our State Department must take a strong moral stand.

• FAX your letter to your congressman and other members of Congress (faxes are best).

• Follow up with a telephone call.

The need for your support is urgent.

Yitzhak Ahronovitch, Skipper of the Exodus in 1947, Dies at 86

The New York Times Obituary, by Margalit Fox:

Yitzhak Ahronovitch, the captain of the refugee ship Exodus, whose violent interception by the British Navy as it tried to take thousands of Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1947 helped rally support for the creation of the state of Israel the next year, died Wednesday in northern Israel. He was 86.

Family members said Captain Ahronovitch died after a long illness, The Associated Press reported.

An antiquated former Chesapeake Bay steamship originally known as the President Warfield, the Exodus 1947, as it was formally renamed, was acquired by the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, in 1946. The group planned to use it to transport refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, to Palestine, then under British control.

The refugees had no legal authority to enter Palestine, and the British were determined to block the ship. In the battle that ensued, three Jews aboard the Exodus were killed. The ship’s passengers — more than 4,500 men, women and children — were ultimately deported to Germany.

The attack and its aftermath, which focused attention on the plight of many European Jews after the war, made headlines worldwide and helped marshal support for an Israeli state.

In a statement on Wednesday, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, said Captain Ahronovitch had “made a unique contribution to the state which will never be forgotten,” Agence France-Presse reported.

The story of the ship’s thwarted journey formed the loose basis for Leon Uris’s novel “Exodus,” published in 1958. In 1960, the novel was made into a film starring Paul Newman as a character based on Yossi Harel, the overall commander of the Exodus operation. Neither book nor movie, apparently, included a character based on Captain Ahronovitch.

Mr. Harel died last year.

Yitzhak Ahronovitch, familiarly known as Ike, was born in Poland in 1923. (His family name has been rendered in news accounts over the years as Aronowicz, Aronowitz, Aharonowitz and Aharonovitz, among other spellings; his first name was sometimes given as Yehiel.) At 10, he moved with his family to Palestine.

As a young man, he was a member of Palmach, the Haganah’s strike force, The New York Times reported in 1961. In World War II, he sailed on British and Norwegian merchant vessels.

Captain Ahronovitch was 23 when he took the helm of the Exodus. On July 11, 1947, he picked up the refugees at Sète, in southern France. On July 18, as the ship neared the coast of Palestine, the British Navy intercepted it. Captain Ahronovitch tried to break through, but two British destroyers rammed the ship.

Several hours of fighting followed, with the ship’s passengers spraying fuel oil and throwing smoke bombs, life rafts and whatever else came to hand, down on the British sailors trying to board, The Times reported at the time. Soon the British opened fire. Two immigrants and a crewman on the Exodus were killed; scores more were wounded, many seriously. The ship was towed to Haifa, and from there its passengers were deported, first to France and eventually to Germany, where they were placed in camps near Lübeck.

Afterward, Captain Ahronovitch lived out of the limelight. In the early 1960s, he studied for a master’s degree in business administration at Columbia.

His survivors include two daughters, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, The A.P. said.

For five years after its violent end, the Exodus lay derelict, moored off Haifa. In 1952 it burned to the waterline, and in 1963 it was scrapped.

  Captain Ahronovitch at Columbia University; a picture of the "Exodus".

There may be some broader lessons from the life of Yitzhak "Ike" Ahronovitch and his commander Yossi Harel, from this paragraph in the Haaretz obituary:

All of Zionism is the story of the struggle between Yossi and Ike. Ike wanted Yossi to continue the war to show that we were heroes and in order to beat the British and Yossi said he didn't bring the ship so that 4,500 Holocaust survivors would be killed, and if Ike's Palmach wanted war he should bring the young people from the kibbutzim. Ike didn't forgive him. No logic would get through to him. He accepted the battle that was almost Masada in the sea. Yossi wanted life. Ike wanted struggle and victory.