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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Duras
Marguerite Duras From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search Marguerite Duras
Born 4 April 1914(1914-04-04)
Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam)
Died 3 March 1996(1996-03-03)
Paris
Occupation Writer
Nationality French
Period 20th century
Genres Novel, drama
Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras (pronounced: [maʁ.ɡə.ʁit dy.ʁas]) (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Background
1.2 Authorship
2 Bibliography
3 Filmography as director
4 Further reading
5 References
6 External links
[edit] Biography[edit] BackgroundShe was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony.
Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her three children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subsequent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period.
At 17, Marguerite went to France, her parents' native country, where she began studying for a degree in mathematics. This she soon abandoned to concentrate on political sciences, and then law. After completing her studies, she became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party). In the late 1930s she worked for the French government office representing the colony of Indochina. During the war, from 1942 to 1944, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper to publishers (in the process operating a de facto book censorship system), but she was also a member of the French Resistance. Her husband, Robert Antelme, was deported to Buchenwald for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely survived the experience (weighing on his release, according to Marguerite, just 84 lbs).
In 1943, for her first novel published Les Impudents, she decided to use as pen name the surname of Duras, a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located.
AuthorshipShe was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays and short fiction, including her best-selling, apparently autobiographical work L'Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover, which describes her youthful affair with a Chinese man. This text won the Goncourt prize in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other forms: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri, was released to great success in 1992. A film version of The Sea Wall was first released in 1958, and remade in 2008 by Cambodian director Rithy Panh.
Other major works include Moderato Cantabile, also made into a film of the same name, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and her play India Song, which Duras herself later directed as a film (1975). She was also the screenwriter of the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which was directed by Alain Resnais.
Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form (their 'romanticism' was criticised by fellow writer Raymond Queneau); however, with Moderato Cantabile she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She was associated with the Nouveau roman French literary movement, although she did not belong definitively to any group. Many of her works, such as Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) and L'Homme assis dans le couloir (1980) deal with human sexuality.[1] Her films are also experimental in form; most eschew synchronized sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a story; spoken text is juxtaposed with images whose relation to what is said may be more-or-less indirect.
Despite her success as a writer, Duras's adult life was also marked by personal challenges, including a recurring struggle with alcoholism. Duras died of throat cancer in Paris, aged 81. She is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
She is noted for her command of dialogue.[2]
L’Amant, her 1984 novel(See The Lover (film), 1992) won the Prix Goncourt.[2]
Bibliography
Les Impudents, Plon, 1943
La Vie tranquille, Gallimard, 1944.
Un barrage contre le Pacifique, Gallimard, 1950 (tr. The Sea Wall, 1967)
Le Marin de Gibraltar, Gallimard, 1952 (tr. The Sailor from Gibraltar, 1966)
Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia, Gallimard, 1953 (tr. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 1960)
Des journées entières dans les arbres, "Le Boa", "Madame Dodin", "Les Chantiers", Gallimard, 1954 (tr. Whole Days in the Trees, 1984)
Le Square, Gallimard, 1955 (tr. The Square, 1959)
Moderato Cantabile, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958 (tr. Moderato Cantabile, 1977)
Les Viaducs de la Seine et Oise, Gallimard, 1959.
Dix heures et demie du soir en été, Paris, 1960 (tr. Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, London, 1961)
Hiroshima mon amour, Gallimard, 1960 (tr. Hiroshima mon amour, 1961)
"Les deux ghettos," in: France-Observateur, November 9, 1961, p. 8-10
L'après-midi de M. Andesmas, Gallimard, 1960 (tr. The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas, 1964)
Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Gallimard, 1964, (tr. The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 1964)
Théâtre I: les Eaux et Forêts-le Square-La Musica, Gallimard, 1965 (tr. The Rivers and the Forests, 1964; The Square; La Musica, 1975)
Le Vice-Consul, Gallimard, 1965 (tr. The Vice-Consul, 1968)
L'Amante Anglaise, Gallimard, 1967 (tr. L'Amante Anglaise, 1968)
Théâtre II: Suzanna Andler-Des journées entières dans les arbres-Yes, peut-être-Le Shaga-Un homme est venu me voir, Gallimard, 1968.
Détruire, dit-elle, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969 (tr. Destroy, She Said)
Abahn Sabana David, Gallimard, 1970.
L'Amour (Love), Gallimard, 1971.
Ah! Ernesto, Hatlin Quist, 1971.
India Song, Gallimard, 1973 (tr. India Song, 1976)
Nathalie Granger, suivi de "La Femme du Gange", Gallimard, 1973.
Le Camion, suivi de "Entretien avec Michelle Porte", Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977.
L'Eden Cinéma, Mercure de France, 1977 (tr. Eden Cinema, 1992)
Le Navire Night, suivi de Cesarée, les Mains négatives, Aurélia Steiner, Mercure de France, 1979.
Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique, Albatros, 1980.
L'Homme assis dans le couloir, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980 (tr. The Man Sitting in the Corridor)
L'Été 80, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980.
Les Yeux verts, Cahiers du cinéma, n.312-313, June 1980 and a new edition, 1987 (tr. Green Eyes)
Agatha, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981 (tr. Agatha)
Outside, Albin Michel, 1981 (tr. Outside)
L'Homme atlantique, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982.
Savannah Bay, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982, 2ème edition augmentée, 1983 (tr. Savannah Bay, 1992)
La Maladie de la mort, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982 (tr. The Malady of Death)
Théâtre III: -La Bête dans la jungle, d'après H. James, adaptation de J. Lord et M. Duras, -Les Papiers d'Aspern, d'après H. James, adaptation de M. Duras et R. Antelme, -La Danse de mort, d'après A. Strindberg, adaptation de M. Duras, Gallimard, 1984.
L'Amant, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1984. Awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt (tr. The Lover)
La Douleur, POL, 1985 (tr. The War)
La Musica deuxième, Gallimard, 1985.
Les Yeux bleus Cheveux noirs, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986 (tr. Blue Eyes, Black Hair)
La Pute de la côte normande, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986.
La Vie matérielle, POL, 1987 (tr. Practicalities)
Emily L., Les Éditions de Minuit, 1987 (tr. Emily L.)
La Pluie d'été, POL, 1990 (tr. Summer Rain)
L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, Gallimard, 1991 (tr. The North China Lover, 1992)
Yann Andréa Steiner, Gallimard, 1992 (tr. Yann Andrea Steiner)
Écrire, Gallimard, 1993
C'est tout, POL, 1995 (tr. No More
__________
Filmography as directorLes Enfants (1984)
Il Dialogo di Roma (1982)
L'Homme atlantique (1981)
Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981)
Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979)
Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979)
Le Navire Night (1979)
Césarée (1978)
Les Mains négatives (1978)
Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977)
Le Camion (1977)
Des journées entières dans les arbres (1976)
Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976)
India Song (1975)
La Femme du Gange (1974)
Nathalie Granger (1972)
Jaune le soleil (1972)
Détruire, dit-elle (1969)
La Musica (1967)__________Further readingCrowley, Martin (2000). Duras, Writing, and the Ethical. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198160135. ISBN 9780198160137.
Glassman, Deborah N. (1991). Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. Rutherford London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Associated University Presses. ISBN 0838633374. http://books.google.com/books?id=JX0-S9Pu4cIC&pg=PP4&lpg=PP4&dq=deborah+n.+glassman+marguerite+duras&source=bl&ots=Jn7HCP_Jbi&sig=IUSp-iM35nXsWK0dd41qbqQchgw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3EJ8T_r_AaLi0QHmuvT6Cw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=deborah%20n.%20glassman%20marguerite%20duras&f=false. ISBN 9780838633373,
Harvey, Robert; Alazet, Bernard; Volat, Hélène (2009). Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras. Bibliographie des oeuvres et de la critique, 1940-2006. Paris: IMEC. pp. 530.
Hill, Leslie (July 10, 1993). Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415050480. http://books.google.com/books?id=AsBdN04TK9cC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=Hill,+Leslie+(1993).+Marguerite+Duras:+Apocalyptic+Desires.+Routledge+isbn&source=bl&ots=lv4pyfmfiW&sig=Pcd_0UWqbattQ13ydt_V6FkBejY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6UB8T9uHH8eUtwfb3cXmDA&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Hill%2C%20Leslie%20(1993).%20Marguerite%20Duras%3A%20Apocalyptic%20Desires.%20Routledge%20isbn&f=false. ISBN 978-0415050487.
Schuster, Marilyn R. (1993). Marguerite Duras Revisited. New York: Twayne. ISBN 0805782982. ISBN 9780805782981.
Vircondelet, Alain (1994). Duras: A Biography. Normal, Illinois. ISBN 1564780651. ISBN 9781564780652.
[edit] References1.^ Alex Hughes, "Erotic Writing" in Hughes and Keith Reader, Encyclopedia of contemporary French culture, (pp. 187-88). London, Routledge, 1998, ISBN 0415131863
2.^ a b "Marguerite Duras". Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.). 2012. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/174178/Marguerite-Duras. Retrieved April 4, 2012.
[edit] External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marguerite Duras
Biography portal
"In Love with Duras" an essay in The New York Review of Books, by Edmund White, June 26, 2008
"The Timeless Marguerite Duras"[dead link]: an article in the TLS by Emilie Bickerton, 25 July 2007
Marguerite Duras at Find a Grave___________________________________________________________
Cet Amour-La
20031hr 34mNRRate 5 starsRate 4 starsRate 3 starsRate 2 starsRate 1 starNot InterestedClearSaving.....Our best guess for Edward:
4.8 stars.Average of 18,034 ratings:
2.8 stars ..Jeanne Moreau stars in this biographical look at T, the Indochina-born French author whose popular books were adapted into plays and films. Duras is wasting away the last years of her storied life plagued with writer's block and adrift in an alcoholic haze … that is, until she meets Yann Andrea (Aymeric Demarigny), a man considerably younger than Duras, and falls passionately in love with him.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D07E7DE1139F931A35757C0A9659C8B63
Cet Amour-La (2001)
April 2, 2003
FILM REVIEW; Marguerite Duras, as a Writer Who's Just a Bit Grumpy
By DAVE KEHR
Published: April 2, 2003
Simulated art has a sad tendency to perform better commercially than the real thing, a fact that specialized film distributors have long been aware of. It is easier to release a puffy gloss on an artist's life (there have been many recent examples, a few among this year's Oscar nominations) than it is to draw a wide public into the dark and messy domain of an artist's actual work.
That rule is borne out, once again, by ''Cet Amour-là,'' a French feature by Josée Dayan that chronicles the love affair between the great experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (played by Jeanne Moreau) and Yann Andréa (Aymeric Demarigny), an admirer some 40 years her junior.
Their relationship began in 1975 when Mr. Andréa met Duras (who died at 81 in 1996) at a screening of her film ''India Song'' at his university. They began a correspondence that lasted until 1980, when Duras took Mr. Andréa into her home, as her confidant, caretaker and, apparently, lover, though the film is tactfully vague on that final point.
With Mr. Andréa contributing to the dialogue, Ms. Dayan (who has spent most of her long career creating movies for French television), has made a film that repeatedly insists on Duras's greatness while sparing the audience the often difficult and uncomfortable task of actually enduring her works.
One of the musical cues used throughout the film is the haunting tango composed by Carlos d'Alessio for ''India Song,'' which is generally regarded as Duras's best work as a filmmaker (she made 19 movies as a director and contributed as a writer to 40 others, in addition to her work as a novelist and journalist). But the musical theme that Duras, through ruthless repetition, turned into a symphony of painful, frustrated desire is employed in ''Cet Amour-la'' as a tinkly, sentimental undertone, as trite and toothless as ''Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.''
In Ms. Dayan's version, the famously difficult Duras comes off as a grumpy but lovable eccentric, a sort of Auntie Mame with bad moods, who encourages the puppyish Yann to find his own voice and follow his dream.
Her chronic alcoholism is swept away by a single visit to a clinic, at which point Duras is able to sit down and create what is perhaps the one bluntly commercial novel of her career, ''The Lover,'' an autobiographical tale of a girl's sexual initiation, which was filmed by Jeanne-Jacques Annaud in 1992 and which Ms. Duras subsequently disowned.
Ms. Moreau, still an imperious presence at age 75, makes no effort to look or sound like Duras -- this is one sacred monster stepping in for another. As Mr. Andréa, Mr. Demarigny is pouty and emotionally vague.
''Cet Amour-là'' opens today at the Lincoln Plaza and Quad Cinemas. ''India Song'' never opened commercially in New York at all.
CET AMOUR-LÀ
Directed by Josée Dayan; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Ms. Dayan in collaboration with Yann Andréa, Maren Sell and Gilles Taurand; director of photography, Caroline Champetier; edited by Anne Boissel; music by Angelo Badalamenti; production designer, Sylvie Fennec; produced by Alain Sarde; released by New Yorker Films. Running time: 98 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Jeanne Moreau (Marguerite Duras) and Aymeric Demarigny (Yann Andréa).
http://www.plume-noire.com/movies/reviews/cetamour-la.html
Cet Amour-Là review
:. Director: Josée Dayan
:. Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Aymeric Demarigny
:. Script: Yann Andréa , Josée Dayan
:. Running Time: 1:40
:. Year: 2001
:. Original Title: Cet Amour-Là
:. Country: France
:. Official Site: Cet Amour-Là
What this film really offers is a chance to study the marvelous Jeanne Moreau: her aged yet beautiful face, her still quite energetic and strong body, her velvet voice, her startling smile. Her persona, period. Without its stunning star, the film goes nowhere. With her, it also goes nowhere, but at least you get to go nowhere with Jeanne Moreau.
The movie is about the last 16 years in the life of French novelist/playwright/scenarist Marguerite Duras (Moreau). Most famous here for her Academy Award nominated screenplay, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Duras spent these years in the company of Yann Andréa, a man 38 years her junior (also, the author of the book upon which this film was based.) In the film, we really have no idea who this man is and apparently neither did Duras. Nor did she want to know. Yann simply moves in with Duras after he presents himself, adoring, to her. She accepts him and then, for what feels like 16 years to the audience, she repetitively throws him out, drinks herself into a stupor, verbally trashes him, writes her final works (with his secretarial help) and spouts out loud her theories about life, love, death and writing. There are no real conversations, nothing much else happens (he does take her to rehab toward the end of the movie, but by that point, do we care?) and she finally dies. Then he writes the book and the movie apparently gets made.
The film is probably trying to be stylistically a mirror of the writer's style and her philosophy. But it just doesn't work as a movie. What we see are the beginnings of scenes, the initiation of intense conflict, and before anything develops there's a fade to black. Then, fade in to another moment, another day or night, and usually a repeat of some earlier conflict. Or, rather, a repeat of the beginning of another conflict or issue or piece of action. And again, before anything can really develop, the sequence yields to another fade out. The one or two scenes that do have a beginning, middle and end are memorable, as are the ones that are montage-like. For example, we see the couple walking along the beach, holding each other close. As if it were part of a montage. But such a scene is not connected to one before or after in any particular way. Strangely, scenes with food in them are memorable: one in which the couple are ordering at a restaurant (this is following her discharge from the alcohol treatment center) and Duras wants to choose the brand of lemonade, as if she were ordering a bottle of wine. I think we remember and enjoy the food scenes because food is concrete, earthy, touchable, sensual, and so little else in this film is. That is, save Jeanne Moreau.
The character (the only other character in the film!) of Yann Andréa, her lover, seemed "translucent," as a friend so described him. There is a sense of light, yet no real clarity about him. Early in the film Duras says that all she knows about him is his name, which has "Stein" attached at the end of it, and that he's a Jew. Nothing more is given about him, and nothing more is revealed or implied in the movie. This bland, blank, seemingly simple man appeared only to want to be with Duras, either to take care of her, or to lean on her. But we never really know or understand him. Here is real potential for drama, but it's completely wasted. Who and why was this person attaching himself Duras? We, the audience, never find out, and the characters in the movie certainly have no clue. That may be the message, but man, such is dull movie-making. If it weren't for the superior cinematography (Caroline Champetier) which opens up the intensity of the two-person box (really only one person) with the gorgeous Breton countryside, I doubt if even Ms. Moreau would have been enough. The original music by David Lynch's often-used Angelo Badalamenti is barely noticeable. Perhaps the vision for this film (as suggested by the hiring of Badalamenti) was to play into the otherworldliness of love and death. But movies are so damn real, only the most creative of filmmakers can manage much success communicating abstractions. Here, the failure in communication was such that I had trouble staying awake.
Yet, many in the audience (at the San Francisco Film Festival) seemed to appreciate the film. I think filmgoers these days are so thankful for anything demonstrating intelligence on the screen that they go away happy, even if they may be mystified. Or maybe (as I suspect) their appreciation was for the fine actress, who clearly threw herself into the person of Marguerite Duras with great honesty. Or, maybe, ideas that emanate around Jeanne Moreau are perhaps automatically watchable. But for me, I seem to at least need Moreau to have maybe a good meal set before her, something sensual, real and understandable. Then we can talk.
.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Westboro in My Town?
http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/westboro-in-my-town/
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
A protester from Westboro Baptist Church.
I noticed the police cars first. Not one, but three. An accident? A bike race? As I got closer to the JCC, though, I saw them.
Not the police. The picketers.
God hates Jews. Jews killed Christ.
Their large neon signs shocked the crap out of me. I have to admit I felt a little scared, even though it was just four adults and one child (don’t get me started on that) behind a barrier, surrounded by police on both sides of the street. Looking back, it was a pretty pathetic demonstration, but in the moment, it felt huge. I wanted to roll down my window and unleash a torrent of angry obscenities on them, but I knew that would only inflame the situation. I drove on.
Jews are going to hell. God hates Jews.
In less than a minute, I was turning into the long driveway up to the JCC, and my mind immediately went to my daughters. What if they had been in the car? Well, it wouldn’t matter much now, as they can’t read. I could have told them it was a side-of-the-road party, and we could have talked about how there were pink letters on the sign. “Pink my favorite color,” Frieda would have told me. And we would have moved on.
But what about when the girls are older? When they can read? How would I explain to them that these people are condemning us? How do I tell them that there is blatant anti-Semitism in the United States? In Massachusetts, a progressive state that I am immensely proud to call my home, and in our own town, where we are supposed to feel safe? How would I explain that?
As I made my way through the JCC, I saw a group of women of all ages in an Israeli dance exercise class. It brought tears to my eyes. F*ck you guys, I thought. You can wave your stupid little signs, but you can’t stop us from dancing.
I soon learned that this angry little band was from the Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-Semitic, homophobic, family of all-purpose haters out of Kansas who has received press for picketing soldiers’ funerals, and more recently, those of Elizabeth Edwards and Elizabeth Taylor. Their frequent and senseless protests have rendered them virtually irrelevant on the national scene, even among the bigots who might have otherwise supported them.
All of sudden, my perspective went from that of a hurt and angry mother to one of interested and disgusted spectator. “When you think about it,” I said to my trainer, “Everyone hates the Jews. Whatever. That’s such a cliché. But who protests at a soldier’s funeral? That’s just absurd. Honestly, they’re like a caricature of an anti-Semite. They might as well be wearing fake Hitler mustaches.”
Humor makes it easier, but the truth is, they were still there, a stark reminder of the hatred and violence that has tormented the Jews throughout our history. And therein lays the challenge that my husband and I, along with thousands of other Jewish parents, face on a regular basis. How do we teach our children about hate and anti-Semitism? With Purim behind us, and Passover just around the corner, a good place to start might be by telling the stories of tragedy and survival of the Jewish people, and by celebrating what we have. Yes, in the years to come my husband and I will tell the girls about their family members who perished in the Holocaust, as well as those who survived. And they will learn of anti-Semitism, and unfortunately, they will probably experience it. But for now, we will celebrate our freedom, eat Bubbe’s matzo ball soup, and know that our community and our people are stronger than any little angry group of protesters with neon signs will ever be.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Historians, Biographers
By: Dr. Abigail Green
Tagged enlightenment, europe, germany, history, holocaust
Dr. Abigail Green’s new book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, is now available
What makes a good biography? I thought about this question a lot when I was writing my book about Moses Montefiore, and I’ve been thinking about it again recently. As a historian, my preference has always been for biographies that illuminate the broader context – books like Elisheva Carlebach’s The Pursuit of Heresy, which brought the world of the itinerant Jerusalem rabbi Moses Hagiz so vividly to life, or Perfecting the World – a wonderful book about Montefiore’s life-long friend, the Quaker philanthropist and physician Thomas Hodgkin.
Of course, such books don’t necessarily make for easy reading.
A couple of weeks ago I contributed to In Our Time, one of the most popular and long-lived discussion programs on British radio. The subject was Moses Mendelssohn, a fascinating character about whom I know rather less than I should. Preparing for this broadcast, I came across Shmuel Feiner’s brilliantly readable little biography of the German-Jewish philosopher, which just came out in the Yale Jewish Lives series. I loved the way it opened with youths throwing stones at Mendelssohn and his family as they walked down Unter den Linden, Berlin’s smartest promenade; and ended, by alluding both to this episode and to German Jewry’s terrible future. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that this pearl of a book was
written by the author of The Jewish Enlightenment, a superb piece of scholarship but famously heavy-going.
Biographers tend to get bogged down in detail, and my own book is no exception. Something about the brief, interpretative format of the Yale series seems to have liberated Feiner. He tells us everything we need to know about Mendelssohn’s thought and brings the man to life, all in about 70,000 words. Each of which is precious. It’s a far cry from Altmann’s classic, 900 page intellectual biography and infinitely more enlightening.
Feiner’s elegantly concise approach contrasts starkly with the other biography I’m reading at the moment: Jonathan Steinberg’s psychologically driven Bismarck, which I’m reviewing for the European History Quarterly. It’s a bulky volume, and like me he had difficulty cutting a life down to size. Steinberg’s earlier books, such as All or Nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust seemed to me to ask the right questions (why did the Italians and the Germans behave differently during the Holocaust?) without coming up with really satisfactory answers. This time, however, he seems to have struck gold. The style is genuinely sparkling, and focusing on an individual rather than broader societal structures seems to play to Steinberg’s strengths. Two things that resonated for me were Steinberg’s emphasis on the emotional dimension of Bismarck’s approach to politics and the way in which the story of Bismarck’s life was intertwined with the evolving and deeply ingrained hostility Junkers like Bismarck felt towards Jews as alien symbols of change and modernity.
Oddly then, these are both books about the German-Jewish symbiosis. Despite their different qualities, they share the same fundamental virtue. Both Feiner and Steinberg are drawing on a lifetime of knowledge – and you can tell that in writing these biographies they had the time of their lives.
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
A protester from Westboro Baptist Church.
I noticed the police cars first. Not one, but three. An accident? A bike race? As I got closer to the JCC, though, I saw them.
Not the police. The picketers.
God hates Jews. Jews killed Christ.
Their large neon signs shocked the crap out of me. I have to admit I felt a little scared, even though it was just four adults and one child (don’t get me started on that) behind a barrier, surrounded by police on both sides of the street. Looking back, it was a pretty pathetic demonstration, but in the moment, it felt huge. I wanted to roll down my window and unleash a torrent of angry obscenities on them, but I knew that would only inflame the situation. I drove on.
Jews are going to hell. God hates Jews.
In less than a minute, I was turning into the long driveway up to the JCC, and my mind immediately went to my daughters. What if they had been in the car? Well, it wouldn’t matter much now, as they can’t read. I could have told them it was a side-of-the-road party, and we could have talked about how there were pink letters on the sign. “Pink my favorite color,” Frieda would have told me. And we would have moved on.
But what about when the girls are older? When they can read? How would I explain to them that these people are condemning us? How do I tell them that there is blatant anti-Semitism in the United States? In Massachusetts, a progressive state that I am immensely proud to call my home, and in our own town, where we are supposed to feel safe? How would I explain that?
As I made my way through the JCC, I saw a group of women of all ages in an Israeli dance exercise class. It brought tears to my eyes. F*ck you guys, I thought. You can wave your stupid little signs, but you can’t stop us from dancing.
I soon learned that this angry little band was from the Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-Semitic, homophobic, family of all-purpose haters out of Kansas who has received press for picketing soldiers’ funerals, and more recently, those of Elizabeth Edwards and Elizabeth Taylor. Their frequent and senseless protests have rendered them virtually irrelevant on the national scene, even among the bigots who might have otherwise supported them.
All of sudden, my perspective went from that of a hurt and angry mother to one of interested and disgusted spectator. “When you think about it,” I said to my trainer, “Everyone hates the Jews. Whatever. That’s such a cliché. But who protests at a soldier’s funeral? That’s just absurd. Honestly, they’re like a caricature of an anti-Semite. They might as well be wearing fake Hitler mustaches.”
Humor makes it easier, but the truth is, they were still there, a stark reminder of the hatred and violence that has tormented the Jews throughout our history. And therein lays the challenge that my husband and I, along with thousands of other Jewish parents, face on a regular basis. How do we teach our children about hate and anti-Semitism? With Purim behind us, and Passover just around the corner, a good place to start might be by telling the stories of tragedy and survival of the Jewish people, and by celebrating what we have. Yes, in the years to come my husband and I will tell the girls about their family members who perished in the Holocaust, as well as those who survived. And they will learn of anti-Semitism, and unfortunately, they will probably experience it. But for now, we will celebrate our freedom, eat Bubbe’s matzo ball soup, and know that our community and our people are stronger than any little angry group of protesters with neon signs will ever be.
_____________________________________________________________________________
By: Dr. Abigail Green
Tagged enlightenment, europe, germany, history, holocaust
Dr. Abigail Green’s new book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, is now available
What makes a good biography? I thought about this question a lot when I was writing my book about Moses Montefiore, and I’ve been thinking about it again recently. As a historian, my preference has always been for biographies that illuminate the broader context – books like Elisheva Carlebach’s The Pursuit of Heresy, which brought the world of the itinerant Jerusalem rabbi Moses Hagiz so vividly to life, or Perfecting the World – a wonderful book about Montefiore’s life-long friend, the Quaker philanthropist and physician Thomas Hodgkin.
Of course, such books don’t necessarily make for easy reading.
A couple of weeks ago I contributed to In Our Time, one of the most popular and long-lived discussion programs on British radio. The subject was Moses Mendelssohn, a fascinating character about whom I know rather less than I should. Preparing for this broadcast, I came across Shmuel Feiner’s brilliantly readable little biography of the German-Jewish philosopher, which just came out in the Yale Jewish Lives series. I loved the way it opened with youths throwing stones at Mendelssohn and his family as they walked down Unter den Linden, Berlin’s smartest promenade; and ended, by alluding both to this episode and to German Jewry’s terrible future. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that this pearl of a book was
written by the author of The Jewish Enlightenment, a superb piece of scholarship but famously heavy-going.
Biographers tend to get bogged down in detail, and my own book is no exception. Something about the brief, interpretative format of the Yale series seems to have liberated Feiner. He tells us everything we need to know about Mendelssohn’s thought and brings the man to life, all in about 70,000 words. Each of which is precious. It’s a far cry from Altmann’s classic, 900 page intellectual biography and infinitely more enlightening.
Feiner’s elegantly concise approach contrasts starkly with the other biography I’m reading at the moment: Jonathan Steinberg’s psychologically driven Bismarck, which I’m reviewing for the European History Quarterly. It’s a bulky volume, and like me he had difficulty cutting a life down to size. Steinberg’s earlier books, such as All or Nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust seemed to me to ask the right questions (why did the Italians and the Germans behave differently during the Holocaust?) without coming up with really satisfactory answers. This time, however, he seems to have struck gold. The style is genuinely sparkling, and focusing on an individual rather than broader societal structures seems to play to Steinberg’s strengths. Two things that resonated for me were Steinberg’s emphasis on the emotional dimension of Bismarck’s approach to politics and the way in which the story of Bismarck’s life was intertwined with the evolving and deeply ingrained hostility Junkers like Bismarck felt towards Jews as alien symbols of change and modernity.
Oddly then, these are both books about the German-Jewish symbiosis. Despite their different qualities, they share the same fundamental virtue. Both Feiner and Steinberg are drawing on a lifetime of knowledge – and you can tell that in writing these biographies they had the time of their lives.
modern anti semitism well and presently alive LEO FRANK
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Modern_History/1700-1914/Modern_Anti-Semitism/Leo_Frank_Lynching.shtml
Leo Frank Is Lynched
Falsely accused of murdering a girl, a Jew is killed by a mob while imprisoned in Georgia.
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Though Jews found freedom and opportunity in America, they also found anti-Semitism. The following article describes one such instance. Reprinted with permission of the American Jewish Historical Society from "Chapters in American History."
In 1913, Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. After Georgia's governor commuted his death sentence, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was being held and lynched him. Leo Frank thus became the only known Jew lynched in American history.
The case still spurs debate and controversy –it even inspired a Broadway play. What are the facts of the Frank case?
The Case Against Frank
"Little Mary Phagan," as she became known, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view Atlanta's Confederate Day parade. She never returned home.
The next day, the factory night watchman found her bloody, sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When the police asked Leo Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, to view her body, Frank became agitated. He confirmed personally paying Mary her wages but could not say where she went next. Frank, the last to admit seeing Mary alive, became the prime suspect.
Georgia's solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, sought a grand jury indictment against Frank. Rumor circulated that Mary had been sexually assaulted. Factory employees offered apparently false testimony that Frank had made sexual advances toward them. The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that Frank had phoned her several times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl.
In this era, the cult of Southern chivalry made it a "hanging crime" for African-American males to have sexual contact with the "flower of white womanhood." The accusations against Frank, a Northern-born, college-educated Jew, proved equally inflammatory.
The Exonerating Evidence
For the grand jury, Hugh Dorsey painted Leo Frank as a sexual pervert who was both homosexual and who preyed on young girls. What he did not tell the grand jury was that a janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, had been arrested two days after Frank when he was seen washing blood off his shirt. Conley then admitted writing two notes that had been found by Mary Phagan's body. The police assumed that, as author of these notes, Conley was the murderer; but Conley claimed, after apparent coaching from Dorsey, that Leo Frank had confessed to murdering Mary in the lathe room and then paid Conley to pen the notes and help him move Mary's body to the basement.
Even after Frank's housekeeper placed him at home, having lunch at the time of the murder and despite gross inconsistencies in Conley's story, both the grand and trial jury chose to believe Conley. This was perhaps the first instance of a Southern black man's testimony being used to convict a white man. In August of 1913, the jury found Frank guilty in less than four hours. Crowds outside the courthouse shouted, "Hang the Jew."
Historian Leonard Dinnerstein reports that one juror had been overheard to say before his selection for the jury, "I am glad they indicted the God damn Jew. They ought to take him out and lynch him. And if I get on that jury, I'll hang that Jew for sure."
Facing intimidation and mob rule, the trial judge sentenced Frank to death. He barred Frank from the courtroom on the grounds that, had he been acquitted, Frank might have been lynched by the crowd outside.
Frank Is Saved, Briefly
Despite these breaches of due process, Georgia's higher courts rejected Frank's appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court voted, 7-2, against reopening the case, with justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes dissenting. Frank's survival depended on Georgia governor Frank Slaton. After a 12-day review of the evidence and letters recommending commutation from the trial judge (who must have had second thoughts) and from a private investigator who had worked for Hugh Dorsey, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment.
That night, state police kept a protesting crowd of 5,000 from the governor's mansion. Wary Jewish families fled Atlanta. Slaton held firm. "Two thousand years ago," he wrote a few days later, "another Governor washed his hands and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor's name has been accursed. If today another Jew [Leo Frank] were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice."
On August 17, 1915, a group of 25 men--described by peers as "sober, intelligent, of established good name and character"--stormed the prison hospital where Leo Frank was recovering from having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. They kidnapped Frank, drove him more than 100 miles to Mary Phagan's home town of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree.
Frank conducted himself with dignity, calmly proclaiming his innocence. Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank's swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants. When his term expired a year later, Slaton did not run for reelection and Dorsey easily won election to the governor's office.
In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally granted Leo Frank a posthumous pardon, not because they thought him innocent, but because his lynching deprived him of his right to further appeal. Mary Phagan's descendants and their supporters still insist on his guilt.
Video provided by Jewish Television Network
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid29474138001?bctid=1351306721
____________________________________________________________________________
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Jewish_World_Today/Jews_Around_the_Globe/Anti-Semitism_Today.shtml
Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century
Taboo no longer?
By Ira Rifkin
Ira Rifkin is a national correspondent for Religion News Service based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization: Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval.
It is an irony of Jewish life that it took the Holocaust to give anti-Semitism a bad name. So widespread was international revulsion over the annihilation of six million Jews that following World War II anti-Semitism, even of the polite variety, became the hatred one dared not publicly express. But only for a time.
At the dawn of the 21st century, virulent, open anti-Semitism has surfaced yet again, and in a big way. One need only read a Jewish newspaper or website--replete as they are with accounts of verbal anti-Semitism by high officials and intellectuals, and anti-Semitic physical attacks by common street thugs--to understand the depth of concern this has stirred among Jews.
The United States
The new anti-Semitism is most apparent in Western Europe and the Muslim world. But even in the United States, long viewed as the world's safest nation for Jews, anti-Semitism's resurgence may be seen in the proliferation of websites maintained by right-wing extremists and anti-Israel activists, and in the rhetoric of left-wing anti-globalization demonstrators on the streets of New York and Washington, many of whom equate Israel with fascism.
Modern Israel, the state its founders believed would provide safe sanctuary for Jews, is the prime target of contemporary anti-Semitism. It is recognizable in anti-Israel criticism that blurs the line between legitimate opposition to Israeli government policies and a barely concealed hatred that blames Israel's very existence--and by extension Jews everywhere, all of whom are presumed to support Israel's every decision--for much of the world's troubles.
The new anti-Semitism is also discernible in the claims that "neocons"--now a trendy pejorative for some well-connected, political conservatives (some of them Jews) who are aligned with Republican policies--are manipulating U.S. foreign policy for Israel's benefit. It amounts to a new twist on the age-old anti-Semitic canard that what Jews seek above all else is global hegemony.
How bad is the situation? "The combination of Jew hatred and the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by hostile governments makes the threat of this anti-Semitism the greatest since the Holocaust," Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman warned in a December 2003 newspaper column.
The Muslim World
Foxman's mention of "hostile governments" was a reference to Middle East Muslim nations that view Israel as a colonialist cancer injected into their midst without any moral or historical justification. Tensions have existed between Jews and Muslims since the seventh-century Jews of Mecca rejected the religious and political leadership of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Still, the violent and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ratcheted up Muslim animosity toward Jews--and the Jewish state--to unprecedented global levels. Making it worse are radical Islamists who, to advance their own cause, cast Jews, along with "crusader" Christians, as the enemies of all Muslims, Palestinian or otherwise.
Muslim anti-Semitism has ranged of late from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad's enthusiastically received claim at the 2003 Islamic Summit Conference that "Jews rule this world by proxy," to the Ramadan holy month broadcasts of multi-part dramatic TV series purporting to document Jewish plans to subjugate the world. Such series, widely shown across the Muslim Middle East, rely heavily on the infamous 19th century anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as "proof" of their claims.
Then there's the constant demonizing in Muslim newspapers and magazines of Jews as "pigs and sons of monkeys," and the fiery sermons of Muslim clerics who equate Jews with Nazis and maintain that virtually all Israeli measures to contain Palestinian terrorism amount to nothing less than a new "Holocaust." Yet another example from July 2003 is the charge in a Saudi Arabian newspaper that Jews of Iraqi ancestry will seek to return to their former homeland now that Saddam Hussein has been ousted "for the realization of expansionist Zionist goals."
Given the heightened state of political tensions that have inflamed the Middle East for nearly a century, Muslim anti-Semitism, it may be argued, can be understood as an inevitable, if tragic, group response to a seemingly unsolvable conflict. Surely there are also Jews who, as a result of the conflict, blindly view all Muslims as supportive of hateful terrorism without ever having spoken person-to-person to a single Muslim.
Europe
Less easily understood, however, is the resurgence of Western European anti-Semitism. There, French Jews have been attacked and Jewish schools burned by arsonists. Israeli academics--whose area of research has nothing to do with politics or Israeli policy--have been uninvited from European academic conferences that likewise aren't political in nature or subject matter. In Turkey, suicide bombers attacked two synagogues during Shabbat prayers in late 2003.
Writing in The Jerusalem Report, commentator Stuart Schoffman postulates that Western European anti-Semitism is both an attempt to shake off Holocaust guilt by arguing that Jews no longer warrant sympathy due to Israel's alleged wrongs, and "a twisted expression of atonement--in France and Belgium in particular, but elsewhere too--for (Europe's) own sordid colonial past."
Also a factor is Western Europe's burgeoning Muslim population. It is simply politically expedient--not to mention a hoped-for hedge against revengeful terrorist rage--for Western European nations with growing Muslim under-classes and shrinking, if not miniscule, Jewish communities, to excuse or even agree with Muslim anti-Semitism rather than confront it.
A European Union report on growing anti-Semitism on the continent unwittingly highlighted this last factor. The study concluded that Muslim youths were in large part responsible for the surge of anti-Semitic incidents across Europe. The EU withheld from publicizing the study--prompting Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and Cobi Benetoff, president of the European Jewish Congress, to jointly accuse EU leaders of exhibiting anti-Semitism. (EU commissioners said they decided to withhold the study because its methodology was flawed.)
A major development in today's anti-Semitism in Europe is its prevalence in the non-communist left. Europe's right-wingers have long used anti-Semitism as a political rallying cry. European communists, taking their cue from the former Soviet Union, also railed against Jews and Judaism as counter-revolutionary elements.
But the current surge in anti-Semitism has seen major artists, intellectuals, and politicians of the left also engaged. Among them have been Portuguese novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, who compared Israel to Nazi Germany; Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who called Jews the root of all the world's evil; and Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to Britain, who was overheard in an unguarded moment at a dinner party calling Israel "a shitty little country" that was bringing the world to the brink of World War III.
Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic
To be fair, legitimate criticism of Israel's actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians cannot all be labeled anti-Semitism, as some would have it. Complicating this is the fact that the Magen David [Star of David] is a symbol for both Judaism and Israel, which gives license to political cartoonists, for example, to depict the Star of David in work claiming to be critical only of Israel's actions and not of Jews more broadly. Israel's claim to be a homeland for global Jewry provides its enemies with additional reason--disingenuous as it may be--to claim that virtually all Jews give aid and comfort to the Jewish state.
Anti-Semitism, then, may be said at times to be in the eye of the beholder. Yet when Israel alone is singled out from among the family of nations as an illegitimate state, when Jewish nationhood is belittled as a modern political claim despite its 3,000-year-long history, and when United Nations officials allow an international conference on racism to focus almost entirely on the Jewish state, as happened in Durban, South Africa, just weeks before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is no surprise that Jews believe they are facing unabashed anti-Semitism rather than legitimate political disagreement.
"Let's be realistic," David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, wrote in mid-2003. "Given its longevity, anti-Semitism in one form or another is likely to outlive us all. That seems like a safe, if unfortunate, bet. No Jonas Salk has yet come along with an immunization protocol to eradicate forever the anti-Semitic virus, nor is any major breakthrough likely in the foreseeable future."
THE SAVVY JEWISH COMMUNITY OF TODAY IS A NECESSITY FOR COUNTERING THE ANCENT HATREDS OF OLD IN NEW GUISES
At the same time, Harris continued, "the Jewish community looks radically different than it did, say, 60 or 70 years ago" when anti-Semitism in Europe erupted into the Holocaust.
"Today, there is an Israel; then, there was not. Today, there are sophisticated, savvy, and well-connected Jewish institutions; then, Jewish institutions were much less confident and sure-footed. Collectively, we have the capacity to track trends in anti-Semitism, exchange information on a timely basis with other interested parties, reach centers of power, build alliances within and across borders, and consider the best mix of diplomatic, political, legal, and other strategies for countering troubling developments."
For Harris, at least, the ability of Jews to stand up to anti-Semitism is greater today then it ever has been. "We may not succeed in each and every case," he said, "but we've come a very long way thanks to a steely determination, in Israel and the Diaspora, to fight vigorously against anti-Semitism, while simultaneously helping to build a world in which anti-Semitism-and everything it stands for-is in irreversible decline."
There are, however, many Jews less confident about the future than is Harris. It remains to be seen whether Harris is correct about Jews' ability to withstand the latest tide of anti-Semitism--and whether those many non-Jews who today speak up in opposition to anti-Semitism will be there should their support become even more crucial.
Leo Frank Is Lynched
Falsely accused of murdering a girl, a Jew is killed by a mob while imprisoned in Georgia.
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Though Jews found freedom and opportunity in America, they also found anti-Semitism. The following article describes one such instance. Reprinted with permission of the American Jewish Historical Society from "Chapters in American History."
In 1913, Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. After Georgia's governor commuted his death sentence, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was being held and lynched him. Leo Frank thus became the only known Jew lynched in American history.
The case still spurs debate and controversy –it even inspired a Broadway play. What are the facts of the Frank case?
The Case Against Frank
"Little Mary Phagan," as she became known, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view Atlanta's Confederate Day parade. She never returned home.
The next day, the factory night watchman found her bloody, sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When the police asked Leo Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, to view her body, Frank became agitated. He confirmed personally paying Mary her wages but could not say where she went next. Frank, the last to admit seeing Mary alive, became the prime suspect.
Georgia's solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, sought a grand jury indictment against Frank. Rumor circulated that Mary had been sexually assaulted. Factory employees offered apparently false testimony that Frank had made sexual advances toward them. The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that Frank had phoned her several times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl.
In this era, the cult of Southern chivalry made it a "hanging crime" for African-American males to have sexual contact with the "flower of white womanhood." The accusations against Frank, a Northern-born, college-educated Jew, proved equally inflammatory.
The Exonerating Evidence
For the grand jury, Hugh Dorsey painted Leo Frank as a sexual pervert who was both homosexual and who preyed on young girls. What he did not tell the grand jury was that a janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, had been arrested two days after Frank when he was seen washing blood off his shirt. Conley then admitted writing two notes that had been found by Mary Phagan's body. The police assumed that, as author of these notes, Conley was the murderer; but Conley claimed, after apparent coaching from Dorsey, that Leo Frank had confessed to murdering Mary in the lathe room and then paid Conley to pen the notes and help him move Mary's body to the basement.
Even after Frank's housekeeper placed him at home, having lunch at the time of the murder and despite gross inconsistencies in Conley's story, both the grand and trial jury chose to believe Conley. This was perhaps the first instance of a Southern black man's testimony being used to convict a white man. In August of 1913, the jury found Frank guilty in less than four hours. Crowds outside the courthouse shouted, "Hang the Jew."
Historian Leonard Dinnerstein reports that one juror had been overheard to say before his selection for the jury, "I am glad they indicted the God damn Jew. They ought to take him out and lynch him. And if I get on that jury, I'll hang that Jew for sure."
Facing intimidation and mob rule, the trial judge sentenced Frank to death. He barred Frank from the courtroom on the grounds that, had he been acquitted, Frank might have been lynched by the crowd outside.
Frank Is Saved, Briefly
Despite these breaches of due process, Georgia's higher courts rejected Frank's appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court voted, 7-2, against reopening the case, with justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes dissenting. Frank's survival depended on Georgia governor Frank Slaton. After a 12-day review of the evidence and letters recommending commutation from the trial judge (who must have had second thoughts) and from a private investigator who had worked for Hugh Dorsey, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment.
That night, state police kept a protesting crowd of 5,000 from the governor's mansion. Wary Jewish families fled Atlanta. Slaton held firm. "Two thousand years ago," he wrote a few days later, "another Governor washed his hands and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor's name has been accursed. If today another Jew [Leo Frank] were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice."
On August 17, 1915, a group of 25 men--described by peers as "sober, intelligent, of established good name and character"--stormed the prison hospital where Leo Frank was recovering from having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. They kidnapped Frank, drove him more than 100 miles to Mary Phagan's home town of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree.
Frank conducted himself with dignity, calmly proclaiming his innocence. Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank's swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants. When his term expired a year later, Slaton did not run for reelection and Dorsey easily won election to the governor's office.
In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally granted Leo Frank a posthumous pardon, not because they thought him innocent, but because his lynching deprived him of his right to further appeal. Mary Phagan's descendants and their supporters still insist on his guilt.
Video provided by Jewish Television Network
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid29474138001?bctid=1351306721
____________________________________________________________________________
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Jewish_World_Today/Jews_Around_the_Globe/Anti-Semitism_Today.shtml
Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century
Taboo no longer?
By Ira Rifkin
Ira Rifkin is a national correspondent for Religion News Service based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization: Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval.
It is an irony of Jewish life that it took the Holocaust to give anti-Semitism a bad name. So widespread was international revulsion over the annihilation of six million Jews that following World War II anti-Semitism, even of the polite variety, became the hatred one dared not publicly express. But only for a time.
At the dawn of the 21st century, virulent, open anti-Semitism has surfaced yet again, and in a big way. One need only read a Jewish newspaper or website--replete as they are with accounts of verbal anti-Semitism by high officials and intellectuals, and anti-Semitic physical attacks by common street thugs--to understand the depth of concern this has stirred among Jews.
The United States
The new anti-Semitism is most apparent in Western Europe and the Muslim world. But even in the United States, long viewed as the world's safest nation for Jews, anti-Semitism's resurgence may be seen in the proliferation of websites maintained by right-wing extremists and anti-Israel activists, and in the rhetoric of left-wing anti-globalization demonstrators on the streets of New York and Washington, many of whom equate Israel with fascism.
Modern Israel, the state its founders believed would provide safe sanctuary for Jews, is the prime target of contemporary anti-Semitism. It is recognizable in anti-Israel criticism that blurs the line between legitimate opposition to Israeli government policies and a barely concealed hatred that blames Israel's very existence--and by extension Jews everywhere, all of whom are presumed to support Israel's every decision--for much of the world's troubles.
The new anti-Semitism is also discernible in the claims that "neocons"--now a trendy pejorative for some well-connected, political conservatives (some of them Jews) who are aligned with Republican policies--are manipulating U.S. foreign policy for Israel's benefit. It amounts to a new twist on the age-old anti-Semitic canard that what Jews seek above all else is global hegemony.
How bad is the situation? "The combination of Jew hatred and the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by hostile governments makes the threat of this anti-Semitism the greatest since the Holocaust," Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman warned in a December 2003 newspaper column.
The Muslim World
Foxman's mention of "hostile governments" was a reference to Middle East Muslim nations that view Israel as a colonialist cancer injected into their midst without any moral or historical justification. Tensions have existed between Jews and Muslims since the seventh-century Jews of Mecca rejected the religious and political leadership of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Still, the violent and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ratcheted up Muslim animosity toward Jews--and the Jewish state--to unprecedented global levels. Making it worse are radical Islamists who, to advance their own cause, cast Jews, along with "crusader" Christians, as the enemies of all Muslims, Palestinian or otherwise.
Muslim anti-Semitism has ranged of late from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad's enthusiastically received claim at the 2003 Islamic Summit Conference that "Jews rule this world by proxy," to the Ramadan holy month broadcasts of multi-part dramatic TV series purporting to document Jewish plans to subjugate the world. Such series, widely shown across the Muslim Middle East, rely heavily on the infamous 19th century anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as "proof" of their claims.
Then there's the constant demonizing in Muslim newspapers and magazines of Jews as "pigs and sons of monkeys," and the fiery sermons of Muslim clerics who equate Jews with Nazis and maintain that virtually all Israeli measures to contain Palestinian terrorism amount to nothing less than a new "Holocaust." Yet another example from July 2003 is the charge in a Saudi Arabian newspaper that Jews of Iraqi ancestry will seek to return to their former homeland now that Saddam Hussein has been ousted "for the realization of expansionist Zionist goals."
Given the heightened state of political tensions that have inflamed the Middle East for nearly a century, Muslim anti-Semitism, it may be argued, can be understood as an inevitable, if tragic, group response to a seemingly unsolvable conflict. Surely there are also Jews who, as a result of the conflict, blindly view all Muslims as supportive of hateful terrorism without ever having spoken person-to-person to a single Muslim.
Europe
Less easily understood, however, is the resurgence of Western European anti-Semitism. There, French Jews have been attacked and Jewish schools burned by arsonists. Israeli academics--whose area of research has nothing to do with politics or Israeli policy--have been uninvited from European academic conferences that likewise aren't political in nature or subject matter. In Turkey, suicide bombers attacked two synagogues during Shabbat prayers in late 2003.
Writing in The Jerusalem Report, commentator Stuart Schoffman postulates that Western European anti-Semitism is both an attempt to shake off Holocaust guilt by arguing that Jews no longer warrant sympathy due to Israel's alleged wrongs, and "a twisted expression of atonement--in France and Belgium in particular, but elsewhere too--for (Europe's) own sordid colonial past."
Also a factor is Western Europe's burgeoning Muslim population. It is simply politically expedient--not to mention a hoped-for hedge against revengeful terrorist rage--for Western European nations with growing Muslim under-classes and shrinking, if not miniscule, Jewish communities, to excuse or even agree with Muslim anti-Semitism rather than confront it.
A European Union report on growing anti-Semitism on the continent unwittingly highlighted this last factor. The study concluded that Muslim youths were in large part responsible for the surge of anti-Semitic incidents across Europe. The EU withheld from publicizing the study--prompting Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and Cobi Benetoff, president of the European Jewish Congress, to jointly accuse EU leaders of exhibiting anti-Semitism. (EU commissioners said they decided to withhold the study because its methodology was flawed.)
A major development in today's anti-Semitism in Europe is its prevalence in the non-communist left. Europe's right-wingers have long used anti-Semitism as a political rallying cry. European communists, taking their cue from the former Soviet Union, also railed against Jews and Judaism as counter-revolutionary elements.
But the current surge in anti-Semitism has seen major artists, intellectuals, and politicians of the left also engaged. Among them have been Portuguese novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, who compared Israel to Nazi Germany; Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who called Jews the root of all the world's evil; and Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to Britain, who was overheard in an unguarded moment at a dinner party calling Israel "a shitty little country" that was bringing the world to the brink of World War III.
Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic
To be fair, legitimate criticism of Israel's actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians cannot all be labeled anti-Semitism, as some would have it. Complicating this is the fact that the Magen David [Star of David] is a symbol for both Judaism and Israel, which gives license to political cartoonists, for example, to depict the Star of David in work claiming to be critical only of Israel's actions and not of Jews more broadly. Israel's claim to be a homeland for global Jewry provides its enemies with additional reason--disingenuous as it may be--to claim that virtually all Jews give aid and comfort to the Jewish state.
Anti-Semitism, then, may be said at times to be in the eye of the beholder. Yet when Israel alone is singled out from among the family of nations as an illegitimate state, when Jewish nationhood is belittled as a modern political claim despite its 3,000-year-long history, and when United Nations officials allow an international conference on racism to focus almost entirely on the Jewish state, as happened in Durban, South Africa, just weeks before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is no surprise that Jews believe they are facing unabashed anti-Semitism rather than legitimate political disagreement.
"Let's be realistic," David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, wrote in mid-2003. "Given its longevity, anti-Semitism in one form or another is likely to outlive us all. That seems like a safe, if unfortunate, bet. No Jonas Salk has yet come along with an immunization protocol to eradicate forever the anti-Semitic virus, nor is any major breakthrough likely in the foreseeable future."
THE SAVVY JEWISH COMMUNITY OF TODAY IS A NECESSITY FOR COUNTERING THE ANCENT HATREDS OF OLD IN NEW GUISES
At the same time, Harris continued, "the Jewish community looks radically different than it did, say, 60 or 70 years ago" when anti-Semitism in Europe erupted into the Holocaust.
"Today, there is an Israel; then, there was not. Today, there are sophisticated, savvy, and well-connected Jewish institutions; then, Jewish institutions were much less confident and sure-footed. Collectively, we have the capacity to track trends in anti-Semitism, exchange information on a timely basis with other interested parties, reach centers of power, build alliances within and across borders, and consider the best mix of diplomatic, political, legal, and other strategies for countering troubling developments."
For Harris, at least, the ability of Jews to stand up to anti-Semitism is greater today then it ever has been. "We may not succeed in each and every case," he said, "but we've come a very long way thanks to a steely determination, in Israel and the Diaspora, to fight vigorously against anti-Semitism, while simultaneously helping to build a world in which anti-Semitism-and everything it stands for-is in irreversible decline."
There are, however, many Jews less confident about the future than is Harris. It remains to be seen whether Harris is correct about Jews' ability to withstand the latest tide of anti-Semitism--and whether those many non-Jews who today speak up in opposition to anti-Semitism will be there should their support become even more crucial.
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