BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference. - IAN KERSHAW Click Here to see a presentation and very informative site about YomHaShoah. Yom HaShoah - How to remember the Holocaust by Rabbi Yehudah Prero Shoah is the Hebrew word for "whirlwind." It is the term used to described the conflagration that swept up six million Jewish souls between 1938 and 1945. A war was waged against the Jews in which unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated against a defenseless people. Men and women, young and old alike, were butchered at the hands of the accursed Nazis, may their name be eradicated for all time. Every year, on Yom HaShoah, we remember the martyrs who sanctified the name of G-d in the camps, the ghettos, and in the gas chambers. A story is told of a unique Chanukah in Aushwitz. It was December, and a group of Jews in Aushwitz desired greatly to have a candle lit on the upcoming holiday. Obviously, there was no way the Germans would allow this ...

by David Weiner For most Americans, Passover is that time once a year when their Jewish friends can't eat pizza. But there's actually a lot more to the holiday than what Jews can and cannot eat, and whose firstborn was killed or not killed (sorry Pharaoh!). For a good overview of the actual holiday, I suggest checking out these two sites. But if you want to impress your Jewish friends with some cool Passover facts, or if you need some good lines to break the ice with at your Seder, read on: 1. The World's Largest Passover Seder Takes Place in Nepal, of All Places. Each year members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement hold their "Seder on Top of the World" in Kathmandu for Jewish locals and travelers alike (I'm gonna guess more the latter than the former). Last year they had around 2,000 people attend the festivities, and you can bet your tuchus that between the flowing wine and the thin air, it was quite the party. 2. Abraham Lincoln Was Assassinated Durin...

By David Weinberg The Obama-Netanyahu confrontation is that the White House wants to move Israel rapidly towards a division of Jerusalem. However, the widely held presumption that splitting Jerusalem will lead to prosperity for the city and to peace for Jews and Arabs is an egregious error. Partitioning Jerusalem will destroy the city. It will die, in every way - culturally, religiously, economically and more. And politically, the shearing of Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish sovereignties will turn it into the bull's eye of Mideast battle - a city that will make Belfast at its worst look like paradise. The main reason for this is that any section of the city handed over to Arab rule will immediately become ground zero for the fierce war being waged within the Arab world over Islamic lifestyle, ideology and legitimacy. Just who is going to rule in Arab eastern Jerusalem? Will it be the declining secular Palestinian national movement (whose sway in the West Bank is tentative a...

A Ritual for Domestic Violence Awareness I ask my friends and fellow bloggers to remember abuse victims as Sukkot begins. Victims of mental, emotional & verbal abuse have "no safe place." While Domestic Violence Month officially begins in October - I would ask all of you to get and wear the Purple Ribbon during Sukkot and all of October - in support of people like myself. Victims & Survivors - who deserve peace & justice. Rebecca Schwartz remembers the first Sukkot observance that her organization, Shalom Bayit, initiated in 1994: A small group of women, survivors of domestic violence and volunteer staff, reclaimed the sukkah as a shelter of peace. "The sukkah was like a refuge," recalls Schwartz, associate director of the San Francisco Bay Area organization devoted to combating domestic violence. "For some, this was the first time they had felt safe in the Jewish community." Today, with more awareness and less denial in the Jewish co...

I never learned there was any Jewish heritage in my family until I was in my early 40s. There was talk... whispers... but nothing conclusive said or seen. My father is from New England stock. A family that goes all the way back to the Mayflower, a small historic cemetery in Oxford, Mass., familial relations to American writer Booth Tarkington and a pride in all things American. I only dated one Jewish man - twice. We worked together and after two dinners on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where we both lived I finally told him that he, being a Modern Orthodox Jew and I, being Catholic -- there was no way this relationship would ever be anything but a friendship. I was very involved in my acting career, I was traveling a lot, and while his parents seemed to like me I was a shiksa ... I would always be a shiksa and I just didn't have the time or inclination to be involved with anyone, let alone someone who's culture (I felt) would never accept me. I was involved with o...

By REBECCA HARSHBARGER in NY and S.A. MILLER in DC   Rep. Pete King says President Obama's weak Mideast policy is forcing House Democrats to make the difficult choice of either supporting Obama or supporting Israel. "I hope they put our relationship with Israel above their relationship with Obama," King (R-LI) said yesterday. Flanked by Jewish community leaders at a press conference across from the United Nations, King rallied support for his legislation calling for the US to quit the UN Human Rights Council and its probe of the Israeli raid May 31 on a flotilla off Gaza. Not a single House Democrat, including the entire New York City delegation, would sign on to that resolution introduced by King last week. But King found Dems and Jewish leaders back in the city who also don't trust the UN council, which regularly bashes Israel. He was joined at the press conference by Democratic Assemblymen David Weprin and Rory Lancman, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik and Jew...

I get asked a lot why I have "suddenly" come out in the last few years as very Pro-Israel and Zionist leaning. My progressive friends know I lean their way on politics in the U.S. -- but can't understand why I lean so right on Middle East issues. They figure I must have some personal agenda. But I don't. Neither was my support "sudden." My reasons are multilayered and to express myself I must digress and seem to go off topic but its the only way I can explain. I was raised by a narcissistic parent. They've been dead 10 years this next September and only a year or so after they passed did I feel safe expressing, let alone feeling my rage at them for what they had done to me. I have no intention of forgiving the unforgivable but I do feel pity for them and hope that Hashem is giving them the healing and help they need now that they're in His care. However, that upbringing made me a magnet for people with personality disorders. I didn't know ...

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by David Harris Throughout his life, one of Yasser Arafat's favorite themes was that there was no historical Jewish connection to Israel. He would assert that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, that the Western Wall has no Jewish significance, and even that Abraham himself wasn't a Jew. Indeed, he went so far as to reject the Jewish link to Jerusalem in the presence of US President Bill Clinton during the Camp David talks, evoking outrage from the American leader and offering insight into why the negotiations were doomed to fail . Arafat's views, unsurprisingly, were echoed relentlessly by Palestinian media outlets and textbooks, not to mention Muslim clergy. Generations of Palestinians were "educated" to believe that the Jews were interlopers, not a people indigenous to the Middle East. This had nothing to do with history, since there was abundant evidence of the intimate Jewish tie to the land dating back well over 3500 years, not to mention the spiri...

By Tali Loewenthal Kindness is often presented as a central virtue of the Jewish people. Abraham, the hero of our parshah, together with his wife Sarah, is a paradigm of kindness. One sees their hospitality to wayfarers at the beginning of the parshah, and later G-d says that He loves Abraham because "he will instruct his household after him to keep the way of G-d, doing charity and justice" (Genesis 18:19). "Charity and justice" signify acts of kindness, and the Talmud cites this verse when it declares that there are three distinguishing features of the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham: They are 1) modest, 2) merciful, and they 3) do acts of kindness. "Anyone who has these qualities," the Talmud goes on to say, "is fit to join the Jewish people." There are different opinions among the Sages as to whether these qualities are natural to the Jewish people or are special "gifts" from G-d. It is also clear that they are ideals t...

By: Sara Esther Crispe I'll never forget how I felt the day my gender studies teacher made the claim that there are absolutely no differences between men and women. I looked around, shocked at the proposition, and wondering if anyone else felt the same. For most of the semester, we had it pounded into our heads that all distinctions between those of different races, geographical locations or habitats were really all the same, and that it was merely society that tried to push that there were actual differences. Perhaps she was right, we all thought. Maybe we had really just bought into society’s definitions and desire to separate. Perhaps it was racist to claim that generally speaking black men were taller than asian men. And sexist to feel that men were physically stronger than women. But then one day, when I could resist no longer, I had to ask a question. If we were really the same, I mean, practically the exact same, then why were women born with a womb and the ability to carry ...

AN OPEN LETTER TO JON STEWART by Ron Rosenbaum Dear Jon Stewart, You probably don't recall, but I was one of your earliest, most enthusiastic media admirers. I wrote a column nearly a decade ago, shortly after you took over The Daily Show, when you were still struggling for recognition of your genius, before the massive media love-in that took a while to develop. My column then took the form of an open letter to David Letterman, about how his show was getting tired and how he ought to get Jon Stewart to replace him. (I like open letters.) I talked about how much I loved the perfect pitch of your TV "newsmagazine" parodies but most of all how I was blown away by your astonishing quickness of wit, most evident in the unscripted interviews. I called you "an idiot savant" of comedy. (That was a compliment—ignore the idiot part, focus on the savant.) So please know I'm writing as an admirer, someone who thinks you have the courage as well as comedic smarts to tak...