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Lag BaOmer
Lag BaOmer (the 33rd day of the Omer count) celebrates the end of the plague amongst Rabbi Akiva's students, and the ascent on high of the soul of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (see "Today in Jewish History"). The mourning practices of the Omer period are suspended, which is why many three-year-old boys receive their first haircut on this day. Many visit the gravesite of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Meron in northern Israel. It is customary to go on outings and to light bonfires; children play with bow-and-arrows to recall that "during the lifetime of Rabbi Shimon the rainbow (--a sign of the world's unworthiness, as per Genesis 9:14) was not seen."
The Lubavitcher Rebbe initiated the organization of parades of Jewish unity and pride on Lag BaOmer and on a number of occasions (in 1953, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1966, 1967, 1970, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1987 and 1990) he addressed the parade held near his headquarters in Brooklyn in which thousands of Jewish children and their teachers participated.
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http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/42915/jewish/The-Morrow-of-the-Shabbat.htm
The Morrow of the Shabbat
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
In the Torah reading of Emor, the commandment of counting the omer is stated: "And you shall count unto you from the morrow of the day of rest ('Shabbat'), from the day that you brought the sheaf ('omer') of the waving; there shall be seven complete weeks" (Leviticus 23:15).
The Talmud (Menachot 65a) tells us that the sect of the Boethusians interpreted the word Shabbat to mean the seventh day of the week, rather than the "day of rest" of Passover. As a consequence they held that the counting of the omer always begins on a Sunday. There was considerable debate, during which the Rabbis brought many scriptural proofs to establish that the Boethusian interpretation was false. But a persistent question remains: Why did the Torah leave room for this error, instead of stating explicitly, "on the day after Passover"?
2. Three Months
In Exodus 3:10, G-d tells Moses: "When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve G-d upon this mountain." In other words, the purpose of the Exodus from Egypt lay in the Giving of the Torah. Between these two events, the Exodus and the Revelation on Sinai, came the seven weeks of the omer. These seven weeks were the necessary transition between the start and the completion of the redemption.
Three months were involved in this process: Nissan, in which the Exodus took place; Iyar, which is wholly taken up with the counting of the Omer; and Sivan, in which the Torah was given.
Only these three are explicitly mentioned in the context of the redemption. Of Nissan it is written: "The month of Spring, . . . in it you came out of Egypt" (Exodus 23:15). Of Iyar we find, "The second month . . . after they had come out of the land of Egypt" (Number 1:1). And of Sivan, "In the third month after the Children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt" (Exodus 19:1). All three are mentioned because each was an integral part of the redemption.
3. Three Kinds of Food
Of these three stages, Passover is linked to the eating of Matzah. The omer was a measure of barley. And Shavuot had a special offering of two loaves of fine flour baked with leaven.
This presents a number of difficulties.
Only two meal offerings did not consist of wheat: The omer, and the offering of a wife suspected of infidelity. Both of these were of barley. In the latter case the Talmud (Sotah 14a) gives a reason: Her offering was to be of animal food as a humiliation for her immorality ("She did the deed of an animal, therefore she brings animal feed as an offering"). But why was the omer of animal food?
On Passover we are forbidden to eat leaven, because leaven symbolizes man's inclination to pride and self-esteem. As leaven causes dough to rise, so pride inflates a man to arrogance. But why, in that case, are we allowed to eat leaven the rest of the year, and indeed obliged (in the Temple) to do so on Shavuot?
4. "Draw Me; We Will Run After You"
In the Song of Songs (1:4), there is a verse, "Draw me, we will run after you; the king has brought me into his chambers." The Kabbalists see these three phrases as references to the three stages of the departure from Egypt. "Draw me" is the Exodus. "We will run after you" is the counting of the omer. "The king has brought me into his chambers" is the giving of the Torah.
"Draw me" is passive -- it refers to the Israelites being taken out by G-d. Also it is singular. Whereas "We will run after you" is both active and plural.
The Zohar explains that by the end of their enslavement, the Israelites were assimilated into the heathen ways of their captors. They were not deserving of redemption. They had to be seized and drawn out of their captivity by the initiative of G-d. Since they were not inwardly prepared for it, this unexpected revelation did not alter them inwardly. They were taken hold of by G-d rather than by the promptings of their heart. And although their "G-dly soul" responded, their "animal soul" was unchanged. One part of their being received the revelation, but the other, the capacity for evil, remained. Indeed, says Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, this is why the Israelites are described as having fled from Egypt (Exodus 14:5). What they were running from was the evil within themselves.
So we can understand the phrase "Draw me." Firstly, when we take possession of an object by seizing hold of it nothing is changed in the subject itself; it merely changes hands: In this case, Israel went from being in the hand of Pharaoh to being in the hand of G-d. Israel in itself was unchanged.
Secondly, it was passive. The drawing out of Egypt was achieved by the hand of Heaven, not by any spontaneous act on the part of the Israelites.
Thirdly, it was singular. The revelation of this sudden intervention of G-d affected only one side of their being. Their spirit responded; their physical passions did not.
5. Intellect and Passion
For all this, the purpose of a revelation is that the spirit should change the physical nature of man as well. As Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi puts it, if man were meant to be pure spirit, he would not have needed a body. The point of a religious life within the world is to bring every side of human nature into G-d's work. In the words of the Talmud: "'And you shall love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart' -- this means, with both your inclinations."
This interplay not only elevates the physical side of man, but also his spiritual life, by adding to it the drive and energy of physical passion. Man as an intellectual being is dispassionate: his emotions and desires are mitigated by the rational control he exercises over them. But animal energy, be it literally in an animal or in the instinctual drives of man, is unchecked, powerful. "There is much increase by the strength of an ox" (Proverbs 14:4).When the animal in man is no longer at war with his spirit, but is sublimated to it, all its passionate intensity is transferred to the life of holiness.
This is why the omer was of barley, animal food. This was the labor of that period: to transform the "animal soul" of the Israelites which had remained unaffected by the initial revelation in Egypt.
How is this done? By meditation. Meditation on the nature of G-d awakens love and fear. At first, when one knows that rebellion, pride and animal obstinacy still hold power within oneself, one must "flee." This is the time of suppression. But once one has left the "Egypt" of temptation, there comes a time of meditation and sublimation, when the two sides of man no longer battle for possession. The spirit rules, and physical nature transfers its energy.
Thus Solomon wrote, "We will run after you." We will run, because our service is quickened by this new source of energy. We will run, because it is we, not G-d, who take the initiative. And "we," in the plural, because both sides of our nature are caught up in this effort of reaching out towards G-d, and each gives impetus to the other.
6. The Final Stage
There is still a further stage. At the Exodus, there was the Divine call. During the counting of the omer, there was man's response. But at the Giving of the Torah, there was the final abnegation of man in the face of G-d.
While for forty-nine days the Israelite was transforming himself, he was still a self, still using his powers and relying on himself. But at Sinai, in the face of G-d, "With every single word that went forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, the souls of Israel departed" (Talmud, Shabbat 88b). They were empty: The only reality was G-d.
Thus it is that on Passover we may not eat leaven. At the outset, when pride and willfulness preserve their power, they must be suppressed, set aside. They cannot be combated rationally for they can subvert the mind: "They are wise to do evil" (Jeremiah 4:22).
At the stage of the omer, we use our understanding to redirect our emotions. We use the leaven in ourselves to change ourselves.
And when, at the point of Shavuot, we reach the final openness of all our being to G-d, we are obliged to use the leaven, making every part of our nature into a channel for the light of G-d.
7. Every Day
The Rabbis tell us, "In every generation, and every day, a man is obliged to see himself as if he had gone out of Egypt that very day" (Talmud, Pesachim 116b; Tanya ch. 47). So each of the three stages of the Exodus are components of the task of every day.
In the beginning of our prayers we say, "I give acknowledgment before you . . ." (the modeh ani prayer). This is the acknowledgment, the surrender to G-d, that precedes understanding. It is the Nissan of the day, the individual Exodus.
There then follow the Psalms of Praise (pesukei dezimrah) and the shema and its benedictions. These are the prayers of meditation, and understanding. "Hear, O Israel," the first phrase of the shema, means "understand." And through this meditation, the emotions are awakened, and the love of G-d is aroused with "all your heart and all your soul and all your might." This is the daily equivalent of the month of Iyar and the counting of the omer.
But, so far, this represents only the battle against half, the "animal" half, of one's nature (bittul ha-yesh). There still awaits the final extinction of self-consciousness (bittul bi-metziut) which comes during the Amidah prayer, when "like a slave before his master" we have no self with which to speak. We are empty of words. We say, "O L-rd, open my lips." And this is the Sivan of the day, the moment when we confront -- like the Israelites at Sinai -- the all-possessing presence of G-d.
8. After the Shabbat
Now, finally, we realize why the Torah, in the verse quoted at the outset, says, "On the morrow of the Shabbat" instead of ". . . after the Passover."
To achieve the transformation of the "animal soul" demands the deepest reserves of spiritual energy. To have brought the Israelites out of their entrenched impurity needed more than an "angel" -- an emissary -- it needed G-d himself in His Glory and Essence. If this was true of the escape from evil, it is more so for the transformation of evil into good. The task demands a spiritual source able to enter into the heart of evil without being affected.
Shabbat is a source of intense spirituality. It is the apex of the week. But it still belongs to the week, and thus to time and the finite. "The morrow of the Shabbat" refers to the step beyond Shabbat, beyond time itself: A revelation higher than the world.
To count the forty-nine days of omer, that is, to transform into holiness every emotion that we feel, we must rest our efforts on the "morrow of the Shabbat" -- the light of G-d from beyond the world.
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Plague among R. Akiva's Disciples Ends (circa 120 CE)
In the weeks between Passover and Shavuot, a plague decimated 24,000 students of the great sage Rabbi Akiva--a result, says the Talmud, of the fact that they "did not respect one another." The plague's cessation on Iyar 18--the 33rd day of the Omer Count or "Lag BaOmer"--is one of the reasons that the day is celebrated each year (see "Laws and Customs" below).
Links: Rabbi Akiva
Akiba ben Joseph
http://www.chabad.org/search/keyword_cdo/kid/1418/jewish/Akiba-ben-Joseph.htm
Knowledge Base » People & Events » People » Mishnaic Sages » Akiba ben Joseph
Akiba ben Joseph: (c. 50-c.135 CE) Among the greatest of the Mishnaic sages. Unless otherwise stated, all Mishnayos are presumed to be in accordance with the Rabbi Akiva's view. He was the son of converts, and an unlearned shepherd. At the age of 40, at the insistence of his wife, he began studying Torah,under Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Joshua ben Hananiah, and Nahum Ish Gamzu ultimately attracting 24,000 students including Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Judah ben Ilai. He supported Bar Kochba's revolt. He was imprisoned and savagely murdered by the Romans for teaching Torah (he is one of the Ten Martyrs).
The Wisdom of Rabbi Akiba
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112059/jewish/The-Wisdom-of-Rabbi-Akiba.htm
Rabbi Akiba whom we remember especially on the day of Lag B'Omer, was the wisest and greatest Tanna (teacher) of his time, and one of the greatest of all times. When he passed away, "he left none like him," the Rabbis said. Many are the wise teachings and laws which he taught, and of which the Talmud is full. We bring you here some of his teachings:
A heathen once came to Rabbi Akiba, and asked him, 'Who created the world?'
'G-d created the world,' Rabbi Akiba replied.
'Prove it to me,' persisted the heathen.
'Come back tomorrow,' Rabbi Akiba told him.
The following day the heathen came back, and Rabbi Akiba engaged him in conversation. 'What are you wearing?', Rabbi Akiba asked him.
'A cloak, as you see.'
'Who made it?' Rabbi Akiba asked.
'The weaver, of course.'
'I don't believe it; prove it to me!' Rabbi Akiba persisted.
'What proof do you want? Cannot you see that the weaver has made the cloth?'
'Then why do you ask for proof that G-d created the world? Cannot you see that the Holy One blessed be He created it.'
And to his disciples Rabbi Akiba added, 'My children, just as the house is proof of the builder, and the cloth is proof of the weaver, and the door is proof of the joiner, so this world proclaims that G-d created it.'
* * *
Rabbi Akiba had learned and studied the Torah more deeply and extensively than anyone else, yet he was very humble, for he knew that the Torah is endless, for it is the wisdom of G-d. Said he, "All my learning is no more than like the fragrance of an Ethrog; the one who scents it, enjoys it; but the Ethrog loses nothing. Or it is as one who draws water from a spring, or lights a candle from a candle."
No wonder Rabbi Akiba despised a conceited and vain man, whose learning only filled him with self-importance and vain glory. Of such a man Rabbi Akiba said, "He is like a carcass lying on the road; whoever passes it puts his fingers to his nose, and hurries away from it."
The following story also illustrates his humility and respect for the Torah.
Rabbi Akiba was once called upon to read to the congregation a portion of the Torah, but he did not want to do it. His amazed disciples asked him, 'Master, have you not taught us that the Torah is our life and the length of our days? Why did you refuse to read it to the congregation?' And Rabbi Akiba replied, simply: 'Believe me, I had not prepared myself for it; for no man should address words of Torah to the public unless he has first revised them to himself three or four times.
Rabbi Akiba did not keep his learning to himself, but had many students and disciples, more than any other single teacher. As you know, he had no less than 24 thousand students at one time. Some of the greatest Rabbis of the next generation were among his disciples, as, for example, Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai, whose Yahrzeit is observed on Lag B'Omer. Together with another great Sage, Rabbi Chanina ben Chakinai, Rabbi Simeon went to Bene Beraq to learn Torah from Rabbi Akiba, and they stayed there for thirteen years!
Quoting a passage from Koheleth (11:6) "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening do not rest thy hand," Rabbi Akiba explained it to mean: "Teach disciples in thy youth, and do not stop teaching in thy old age."
As you know, it is customary to say 'Perek' (Sayings of Our Fathers) on the Sabbath, beginning with the Sabbath after Pesach. Some say it until Shovuoth, others throughout the summer. Among the 'Fathers' whose teachings we find in this tractate of the Mishnah there is also Rabbi Akiba. In the third chiapter we find the following sayings of his:
"Jesting and frivolity lead a man on to immorality.
"The Massorah (Tradition) is a fence to the Torah.
"Tithes (the prescribed Tzedoko, charity) are a fence to riches.
"Vows (self-restraint) are a fence to a holy life.
"A fence to wisdom is silence."
He used to say:
"Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of G-d. . .
"Beloved are Israel, for they were called children of G-d. . .
"Beloved are Israel, for unto them was given the desirable Torah."
Man is indeed the beloved creature, and Israel has been chosen to receive the Torah; that is why one's responsibility is all the greater. And so he reminds us:
"Everything is foreseen (by G-d), yet freedom of choice is given; and the world is judged with grace, yet all is according to the amount of work accomplished."
Rabbi Akiba goes on to compare the world to a store, where anybody can come and buy things on credit, but everything is recorded in a ledger, and payment will have to be made. Said he:
"Everything is given on pledge, and a net is spread over all the living: the shop is open; and the shopkeeper gives credit; and the ledger lies open; and the hand writes; and whosoever wishes to borrow may come and borrow; but the collectors regularly make their daily rounds; and exact payment from man, whether he is willing or not.
We have no more room here to give you many more of his great sayings and teachings, so we will conclude with one of his favorite sayings, which will do us good to remember always:
"Whatever G-d does is for the best."
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111935/jewish/Rabbi-Akiba-in-Prison.htm
Rabbi Akiba in Prison
In Prison
Rabbi Akiba lived at a time when the Romans were the rulers in the Holy Land, ever since they had destroyed the Beth Hamikdosh. There came a time when the Romans treated the Jews very harshly, and forbade them to study the Torah and observe the Mitzvoth. Rabbi Akiba, however, continued to teach his many pupils, until he was arrested and put into prison.
The warden of the prison permitted one of Rabbi Akiba's students to bring water to the prisoner. His name was Rabbi Joshua ha-Garsi (meaning, the Grinder of Beans, for this was his trade; there is another opinion that the name refers to his native town).
Every day Rabbi Joshua brought his master in prison a measure of water. Once the warden noticed what a large measure of water it was. "No man drinks so much water," the warden said suspiciously. "Maybe he wants to undermine the foundation of the prison?" Saying this, the warden poured out half of the water, and gave Rabbi Joshua the other half to take to the prisoner.
Asked why he was late, Rabbi Joshua explained to Rabbi Akiba what had happened. "Never mind," said Rabbi Akiba soothingly, "let me now wash my hands, so that I may have something to eat."
Rabbi Joshua ha-Garsi said, "If you use the water for washing your hands, there will not be enough water to drink!"
Then Rabbi Akiba said, "What can I do? To eat with unwashed hands is a sin. It is better to die of thirst than to commit a sin."
When the Sages later heard of Rabbi Akiba's conduct, they said, "If he acts in this pious way now that he is an old man, how much more careful must he have been when he was younger and stronger. And if he observes every law while he is in prison, how much stricter in his observance must he have been at home! Also, note how important is the Mitzvah of washing the hands before meals!"
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112076/jewish/The-Daughter-of-Rabbi-Akiba.htm
TZEDAKAH DELIVERS FROM DEATH
The Daughter of Rabbi Akiba
The Star-Gazers Were Wrong
Rabbi Akiba’s daughter once went to the market to buy things for the home. As she passed a group of star-gazers and fortune–tellers, one of them said to the other: “see that lovely girl? What a dreadful calamity is awaiting her! She is going to die on the very day of her wedding. Mark my word!”
Rabbi Akiba’s daughter overheard the words of the star-gazer, but paid no attention to him. She had often heard it from her great father that he who observes the Mitzvoth of the holy Torah need fear no evil.
As the happy day of her wedding approached, she had forgoten all about that star-gazer. On the day before her wedding, there was much to do, and at night she retired to bed, tired but happy. Before going to bed, she removed her golden hair-pin and stuck it in the wall, as she had done before.
The following morning, she pulled her pin from the wall, and in doing so dragged a small but very poisonous snake with it. Horrified, she realized that she had killed the snake that was lurking in the wall's crevice when she stuck the pin into the wall the night before. What a wonderful miracle!
Then she remembered the words of the star-gazer, and shuddered.
She heard a knock on the door. “Are you alright, daughter? I heard you shriek,” her father said. Then he saw the dead snake still dangling from the pin. She told her father what happened.
“This is indeed a miracle,” Rabbi Akiba said. “Tell me, daughter, what did you do yesterday? There must have been some special Mitzvah that you performed yesterday to have been saved from this.”
“Well, the only thing that I can remember was this. Last night, when everybody was busy with the preparations for my wedding, a poor man came in, but nobody seemed to notice him, so busy everbody was. I saw that the poor man was very hungry, so I took my portion of the wedding-feast and gave it to him.”
Rabbi Akiba had always known that his daughter was very devoted to the poor, but this was something special, and he was very happy indeed. “Tzedoko (charity) delivereth from death,” he exclaimed.
Rachel, Rabbi Akiba's Wife
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111936/jewish/Rachel-Rabbi-Akibas-Wife.htm
I am sure, all of you know of Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, about whom our Sages say that he was one of the greatest Scholars of all times. With his sharp mind the Sages said, he could "uproot mountains," and he explained every single letter of the Torah, even the little crowns that adorn many of the letters of the Torah. Rabbi Akiba- was one of four great Sages who tried to enter the deepest secrets of the Creation and of learning, and he was the only one .who came out sound of body and sane of mind.
But do you also know that all the extraordinary scholarship of this most famous of all Tanaim was due to the self sacrificing love of Torah of his wife?
You see, Rabbi Akiba was not one of the fortunate ones who are born to riches, or into the house of a scholar. He had to get everything the hard way. He was born as the child of a very poor family and became an ignorant shepherd, one of the many who took care of the thousands of flocks of the wealthy Kalba Sabua, about whose riches the Talmud tells many stories. The daughter of this fabulous man, was a beautiful and G-d fearing girl. The richest and most learned young men of that time would have considered themselves fortunate to marry her. But Rachel, Kalba Sabua's only child, the heir to his riches, had observed the shepherd Akiba and some inner voice told her that this ignorant youth had the making of a great scholar. On the condition that he would leave her father's work to go and study Torah, she married him secretly.
As Rachel refused one young man after the other, Kalba Sabua found out about her secret marriage to his former shepherd. He was very angry and he vowed that he would have nothing to do with her or her husband. Gladly, the only child of the richest man of those days left all the luxuries and comforts to which she had been used, and went to live with Akiba in a shack, sleeping on a bundle of straw, and working hard with her own, soft hands, so that her husband could devote himself to the study of Torah. Once when she could not find work, she even cut off her beautiful long hair to sell it, so that she would have some money with which to buy a dry crust of bread for both.
Yet even in their poverty, they were willing to share with others the little they possessed. Once a poor man passed the shack of Akiba and Rachel, and begged, "Pray, good people, let me have a handful of straw. My wife is sick and I have nothing to bed her on." At once Akiba shared his own bundle of straw with the poor man, remarking thus to Rachel: "See, my child, there are those who fare worse than we." The poor beggar, say our sages, was none but the Prophet Elijah who had come to test Akiba's good heart.
After Akiba had mastered the basic knowledge of the Torah, his wife and he agreed that he was to go to the academy of the great scholars of those days, headed by Rabbi Eliezer, to devote twelve years to intensive study. Thus the two parted and for twelve long years Rachel slaved hard to support herself, while her husband grew to become one of the most learned of all men that ever lived. At the end of twelve years Rabbi Akiba returned to his wife, as he had promised. When he came before the shabby old shack he heard a conversation between his wife and a neighbor who was taunting Rachel for being foolish enough to wait and slave for her husband who had left her to study Torah. "You could live in riches and luxuries, if you were not so foolish," said the woman.
"For my part he could stay away another twelve years at the Yeshivah to acquire more knowledge," was Rachel's reply.
Full of pride and admiration for his great wife Rabbi Akiba turned around to do as Rachel wanted him to do.
At the conclusion of the twenty four years Rabbi Akiba had become the most famous of all living scholars. From near and far came the youth of Israel to study under his direction.
Accompanied by twenty four thousand students, Rabbi Akiba returned home in a triumphant journey from city to city, welcomed everywhere by the highest nobility. The masses, rich and poor, turned out when he came home to Jerusalem.
Kalba Sabua, too, was among those who tried to get close to the master. Suddenly Rabbi Akiba saw his disciples trying to hold back a woman dressed in ragged clothes. At once he made his way through the crowd to greet the woman and led her to the chair by his side. "If not for this woman I would be an ignorant shepherd, unable to read the Aleph Beth. Whatever I know, I owe to her," Rabbi Akiba declared.
The whole huge crowd bowed in respect before the woman to whom Rabbi Akiba owed his great scholarship. Kalba Sabua, too, suddenly discovered who his son-in-law was. Publicly he expressed his regret for having treated his daughter and her husband so badly. Now all his wealth would be theirs.
Thus ends our story of Rachel, Rabbi Akiba's wife, whose heroism and self-sacrifice gave us the great Rabbi Akiba.
The Fox and the Fishes
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2872/jewish/The-Fox-and-the-Fishes.htm
Talmud, Berachot 61b
Once, the wicked government [of Rome] decreed that the Jewish people were forbidden to study Torah. Pappus ben Judah saw Rabbi Akiva convening gatherings in public and studying Torah [with them]. Said he to him: "Akiva, are you not afraid of the government?"
Said [Rabbi Akiva] to him: "I'll give you a parable.
"A fox was walking along a river and saw fish rushing to and fro. Said he to them: 'Why are you fleeing?'
"Said they to him: 'The nets that the humans spread for us.'
"Said he to them: 'Why don't you come out onto the dry land? We'll live together, as my ancestors lived with your ancestors.'
"Said they to him: 'Are you the one of whom it is said that you are the wisest of animals? You're not wise, but foolish! If, in our environment of life, we have cause for fear, how much more so in the environment of our death!'
"The same applies to us: if, now, when we sit and study the Torah, of which it is said (Deuteronomy 30:20), For it is your life and the lengthening of your days, such is our situation, how much more so if we neglect it....
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2895/jewish/24000-Plus-One.htm
24,000 Plus One
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
Courtesy of MeaningfulLife.com
There was once a man who had twenty-four thousand disciples. He taught them to love, but their love was too absolute, too true, to be loving. They died, and their death spawned a period of mourning that darkens our calendar to this very day.
This man had one disciple who devoted his entire life -- literally his every minute -- to the pursuit of truth. Yet his truth was true enough to love. He, too, passed from this world, and the anniversary of his passing is celebrated as a day of joy and festivity to this very day.
This, in a word, is the story of Lag BaOmer -- the story of Rabbi Akiva and his greatest disciple, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.
A Celebrated Death
The 18th of Iyar is Lag BaOmer -- the 33rd day of the Omer Count which spans the seven weeks from Passover to Shavuot. Two joyous occasions are associated with this day. During the Omer period we mourn the deaths of 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva who died in a plague because, as the Talmud informs us, "They did not conduct themselves with respect for each other"; Lag BaOmer is the day on which the plague ended and the dying ceased. Lag BaOmer is also the anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Akiva's greatest disciple, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Before his death (many years later, without connection to the plague), Rabbi Shimon referred to the day of his passing as "the day of my happiness" and instructed his disciples that it be observed each year as a day of joyous celebration.
Why is the passing of Rabbi Akiva's other disciples mourned as a national tragedy, while the passing of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is remembered with celebration and joy? Indeed, the very same day that celebrates the end of the dying of Rabbi Akiva's disciples, celebrates the death of his greatest disciple! To unravel the paradox of Lag BaOmer, we must first examine the root of the disrespect that caused the plague amongst Rabbi Akiva's disciples.
Rabbi Akiva taught that "Love your fellow as yourself is a cardinal principle in Torah"; indeed, this is the most famous of his teachings. One would therefore expect that Rabbi Akivas disciples would be the foremost exemplars of this principle. How was it that they, of all people, were deficient in this area?
But their very diligence in fulfilling the precept "Love your fellow as yourself" was their undoing. Our sages have said that "Just as every person's face differs from the faces of his fellows, so, too, every person's mind differs from the minds of his fellows." When the twenty-four-thousand disciples of Rabbi Akiva studied their master's teachings, the result was twenty-four-thousand nuances of understanding, as the same concepts were assimilated by twenty-four-thousand minds -- each unique and distinct from its 23,999 fellows. Had Rabbi Akiva's students loved each other less, this would have been a matter of minor concern; but because each disciple loved his fellows as he loved himself, he felt compelled to correct their erroneous thinking and behavior, and to enlighten them as to the true meaning of their master's words. For the same reason, they found themselves incapable of expressing a hypocritical respect for each others' views when they sincerely believed that the others' understanding was lacking, even in the slightest degree.
The greater a person is, the higher are the standards by which he is judged; in the words of our sages, "With the righteous, G-d is exacting to a hairsbreadth." Thus, what for people of our caliber would be considered a minor failing had such a devastating effect upon the disciples of Rabbi Akiva.
The Thirteenth Year
But there was one disciple of Rabbi Akiva who learned to overcome the pitfalls of uncompromising love and uncompromising truth, as exemplified by the following incident in the life of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai:
The Talmud relates that when the Roman rulers of the Holy Land placed a price on the heads of Rabbi Shimon and his son Rabbi Elazar, they hid in a cave for twelve years. During this time, they spent every minute of their day studying Torah. When they emerged from the cave, they were shocked to discover people plowing and sowing: how could people set aside the eternal life that is Torah and occupy their days with the transitory life of the material? So intense was their wrath at such folly that whatever met with their burning glance went up in flames. Proclaimed a voice from heaven: "Have you come out to destroy My world? Return to your cave!" Rabbi Shimon's thirteenth year of study, while increasing his knowledge and appreciation of the truth of Torah, also taught him the value of endeavors other than his own. Now, wherever he went, his look would heal rather than destroy.
The 4,000-year history of Jewish learning has known many great and diligent students of Torah; yet none epitomized the absolute devotion to the pursuit of the divine truth to the extent exemplified by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Throughout the writings of our sages, his example is cited as the ultimate case of torato um'nato, "one whose study of Torah is his sole vocation."
Certainly, then, Rabbi Shimon's commitment to truth was no less absolute than that of Rabbi Akiva's other disciples. Yet his truth was true enough to love. In his thirteenth year in the cave, he attained a dimension of the divine truth that tolerates, indeed embraces, the many and diverse avenues of connection to G-d which the Creator has provided to a humanity whose minds, characters and temperaments are as diverse as their number. In his thirteenth year in the cave, Rabbi Shimon attained a level of truth in which he could utterly devote himself to the eternal life that is Torah, and advocate such devotion for everyone else, and at the same time appreciate and respect the path of those who serve G-d via the temporal life of material endeavors.
So the very same day that celebrates the end of the plague amongst Rabbi Akiva's disciples also celebrates the passing of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The Chassidic masters explain that the passing of a righteous person marks the point at which "all his deeds, teachings and works" attain the pinnacle of fulfillment and realization and the point of their most powerful influence upon our lives. And the deeds, teaching and works of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai are the ultimate rectification of Rabbi Akiva's disciples' tragic failure to achieve the proper synthesis of love and truth that would make their love true and their truth loving.
As Yourself
As noted above, it is only among men of the caliber of Rabbi Akiva's disciples that such a failing could bode such devastating results. But our sages chose to record this story for posterity and fix it in our lives with a series of laws that govern our behavior in the weeks between Passover and Shavuot each year. Obviously, we, too, have something to learn from what happened to Rabbi Akiva's disciples.
THE LESSON IS TWO FOLD
The lesson is twofold: we must learn from their virtues as well as from their mistakes. We must learn to care enough for our fellow man not to indulge his errors and accommodate his failings. This might be the easiest and most socially comfortable way to behave, but, rather than tolerance, it bespeaks an indifference toward his or her welfare. On the other hand, we must never allow our commitment to his betterment to lessen in the slightest our respect and esteem toward him, no matter how misguided and unresponsive he might be.
If this seems paradoxical, it is. But the ability to embrace this paradox is at the very heart of the Torah's commandment to "Love your fellow as yourself." For in regard to ourselves, it is a paradox with which we are quite comfortable -- every psychologically healthy person loves himself unconditionally and, at the same time, incessantly strives to improve himself. This paradox we must also cultivate in our relationship with others: on the one hand, we must never compromise our efforts to improve our fellow man out of respect for his views and feelings; on the other hand, we must never allow these efforts to compromise our love and respect for him.
For to succumb to either compromise is to fail to love him as we love ourselves -- a principle which Rabbi Akiva considered fundamental to G-d's blueprint for life and of which Hillel said: "This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary."
______________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Monday, May 14, 2012
A_Stoning_in_Fulham_County
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/A_Stoning_in_Fulham_County/70206821?trkid=496624
A Stoning in Fulham County
19881hr 34mNRRate 5 starsRate 4 starsRate 3 starsRate 2 starsRate 1 starNot InterestedClearSaving.....Our best guess for Edward:
4.9 stars.Average of 17,423 ratings:
3.7 stars ..Based on a true story, this thought-provoking drama profiles two fathers: an Amish man whose young child is killed by reckless teens, and the prosecutor who tries to bring the youths to justice despite the condemnation he faces from the community.
Well done and important story of how the legal system upholds justice. I wept as I always do when harm comes to an innocent child. I have always admired and liked the Amish, and it is unfortunate that they are often harassed in this manner. The movie, dated as it is, also speaks of more innocent times, where rock throwing led to a terrible tragedy. In more recent times we have the horrific events such as the Amish school girls gunned down, and other violent intentional crimes. Ron Perlman and all the actors did an excellent job.
I am not AmIsh but I read a lot of books about the Amish lives. I would love to go back to the way things were in the old days, a simple life living by the word of God. This was a very well written and acted out movie. I am ashamed and embarrassed by the way these people are treated by others on a daily basis. They are no different than any other religion except that the old order drive horse and buggy, have no electricity, and live off the land and raise livestock. I think anyone who judges and mistreats them are most likely jealous. Great movie and very sad!
http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-synopsis/a-stoning-in-fulham-county/
Synopsis
A Stoning in Fulham County spends much of its screen time in a rural North Carolina Amish community. The tendency of the Amish to shun all modern convenience and to keep to themselves has fomented hostility from their neighbors. When the baby daughter of Amish couple Ron Perlman and Maureen Mueller is killed by a gang of rock-throwing teenagers, their anguish is virtually laughed off by the rest of the locals. Young county prosecutor Ken Olin tries to build a case against the assailant even though the grieving parents refuse to bring the case to court. He is also determined to press for conviction without calling to the stand the sole eyewitness--his own daughter (Olivia Burnette). A Stoning in Fulham County is distinguished by several top-rank acting performances, not the least of which is Ron Perlman's portrayal of a compassionate yet taciturn man who is spiritually incapable of adjusting his lifestyle for the convenience of others. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_life_in_the_modern_world
Amish life in the modern world From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
Amish country
Amish schoolchildrenAs time has passed, the Amish have felt pressures from the modern world. Their traditional rural way of life was becoming more and more different from modern society. Isolated groups of Amish population may have genetic disorders and other problems of closed communities. Amish make decisions on health, education and relationships based on their Biblical beliefs. Amish life has influenced some things in popular culture.
Contents [hide]
1 Education
Education
Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1941.The Amish do not educate their children past the eighth grade, believing that the basic knowledge offered up to that point is sufficient to prepare one for the Amish lifestyle.[1][2] Almost no Amish go to high school, much less to college. In many communities, the Amish operate their own schools, which are typically one-room schoolhouses with teachers (young unmarried women) from the Amish community. These schools provide education in many crafts, and are therefore eligible as vocational education, fulfilling the nationwide requirement of education through the 10th grade or its equivalent. There are Amish children who go to non-Amish public schools, even schools that are far away and that include a very small Amish population. For instance, there have been some Amish children who have attended Leesburg Elementary School in Leesburg, Indiana (about 12 mi (19 km) from Nappanee, Indiana), because their families lived on the edge of the school district. In the past, there have been major conflicts between the Amish and outsiders over these matters of local schooling. But for the most part, they have been resolved, and the educational authorities allow the Amish to educate their children in their own ways. Sometimes, there are conflicts between the state-mandated minimum age for discontinuing schooling, and the younger age of children who have completed the eighth grade. This is often handled by having the children repeat the eighth grade until they are old enough to leave school. In the past, when comparing standardized test scores of Amish students, the Amish have performed above the national average for rural public school pupils in spelling, word usage, and arithmetic. They performed below the national average, however, in vocabulary.[3]
On May 19, 1972, Jonas Yoder and Wallace Miller of the Old Order Amish, and Adin Yutzy of the Conservative Amish Mennonite Church, were each fined $5 for refusing to send their children, aged 14 and 15, to high school. In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the conviction, and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this, finding the benefits of universal education do not justify a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court quoted sociology professor John A. Hostetler (1918–2001), who was born into an Amish family, wrote several books about the Amish, Hutterites, and Old Order Mennonites, and was then considered the foremost academic authority on the Amish. Donald Kraybill, Distinguished College Professor and Senior Fellow in the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, is one of the most active scholars studying the Amish today.[
2 Use of modern technology
Use of modern technology
Modern and Amish transportation in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.The Older Order Amish are known for their avoidance of certain modern technologies. Amish do not view technology as evil, and individuals may petition for acceptance of a particular technology in the local community. In Pennsylvania, bishops meet in the spring and fall to discuss common concerns, including the appropriate response to new technology, and then pass this information on to ministers and deacons in a subsequent meeting.[4] Because of this flat governing structure, variations of practice develop in each community.
Telephone booth set up by an "English" farmer for emergency use by local Amish families.High voltage electricity was rejected by 1920 through the actions of a strict bishop, as a reaction against more liberal Amish[5] and to avoid a physical connection to the outside world.[6] Because of the early prohibition of electricity, individual decisions about the use of new inventions such as the television would not be necessary. Electricity is used in some situations when it can be produced without access to outside power lines. Batteries, with their limited applications, are sometimes acceptable. Electric generators may be used for welding, recharging batteries, and powering milk stirrers in many communities. Outdoor electrical appliances such as riding and hand-pushed lawn mowers and string trimmers are used in some communities. Some Amish families have non-electric versions of appliances, such as kerosene-powered refrigerators. Some Old Order Amish districts may allow the use of thermal solar panels.[citation needed]
Amish communities adopt compromise solutions involving technology that seem strange to outsiders.[citation needed] Petrol-powered farm equipment, such as tillers or mowers, may be pushed by a human or pulled by a horse. The reasoning is that Amish farmers will not be tempted to purchase more land to out-compete other farmers in their community, if they have to move the equipment manually. Amish farmers employ chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and artificial insemination of cows.[7]
The Ordnung is the guide to community standards, rather than doctrine that defines sin. For example, the four Old Order Amish communities of Allen County, Indiana, are more conservative than most; they use open buggies, even during the winter, and they wear black leather shoes even in the hot summer.
Signs erected in areas with Old Order Amish, Old Order Mennonite or members of a few different Old Order Brethren groups, alerting motorists to the presence of horse-drawn vehicles.
Amish buggy rides offered in tourist-oriented Shipshewana, Indiana.Restrictions are not meant to impose suffering. Disabled people are allowed to use motorized wheelchairs; electricity is allowed in the home for medical equipment.[8] Those who break the rules may be given many months to resolve the problem so that they can use a computer to complete a business project or remove electric wiring from a new house.[9]
Although most Amish will not drive cars, they will hire drivers and vans, for example, for visiting family, monthly grocery shopping, or commuting to the workplace off the farm, though this too is subject to local regulation and variation. The practice increases the geographic reach of the Amish, and decreases isolation: a horse can travel only about 25 miles (40 km), and it must rest for a considerable period, restricting the Amish to a radius of 12.5 miles (20.1 km) from home. Moreover, a horse and buggy can only sustain 10 mph (16 km/h) over an extended distance, and thus is impractical for emergencies.[10] Regular bus service between Amish communities has been established in some areas, and train travel is accepted.
The Old Order Amish tend to restrict telephone use, as it is viewed by some as interfering with separation from the world. By bringing the outside world into the home, it is an intrusion into the privacy and sanctity of the family, and interferes with social community by eliminating face-to-face communication. Amish of Lancaster County use the telephone primarily for outgoing calls, with the added restriction that the telephone not be inside the house, but rather in a phone "booth" or small out-building placed far enough from the house as to make its use inconvenient. These private phones may be shared by more than one family. This allows the Amish to control their communication, and not have telephone calls invade their homes, but also to conduct business, as needed. In the past, the use of public pay phones in town for such calls was more common; today, with dwindling availability of pay phones because of increased cell phone use by the non-Amish population, Amish communities are seeing an increase in the private phone shanties.[11] Many Amish, particularly those who run businesses, use voicemail service.[12] The Amish will also use trusted "English" neighbors as contact points for passing on family emergency messages. Some New Order Amish will use cellphones and pagers, but most Old Order Amish will not.[13]
3 Relations with the outside world
Relations with the outside worldAs time has passed, the Amish have felt pressures from the modern world. Child labor laws, for example, are threatening their long-established ways of life, and raise questions regarding the treatment of children in an Amish household, and also in the way the Amish view emotional and medical support. A modern society places little emphasis on the emotional and spiritual bonds found in an Amish household that bind them together as a people. There is instead a negative perception regarding how the Amish choose to view some medical conditions as being 'The Will of God', without always receiving modern medical treatment found in hospitals or medical clinics; though many Amish communities maintain communal telephones to reach others in cases of emergency. Amish children often follow in their faith's long-standing tradition of being taught at an early age to work jobs in the home on the family's land or that of the community. Children are taught the traditions of their parents or immediate family until adolescence, when they are able to go into the world and compare their family's teachings with those of the world through rumspringa. Viewed as a respectful and enduring group, the Amish still spark controversy in modern society relating to their methods of raising young children, which vary greatly from the non-Amish.
Contrary to popular belief, some of the Amish vote, and they have been courted by national parties as potential swing voters: while their pacifism and social conscience cause some of them to be drawn to left-of-center politics, their generally conservative outlook causes many to favor the right wing.[14][15][16]
They are nonresistant, and rarely defend themselves physically or even in court; in wartime, they take conscientious objector status. Their own folk-history contains tales of heroic nonresistance, such as the insistence of Jacob Hochstetler (1704–1775) that his sons stop shooting at hostile Indians, who proceeded to kill some of the family and take others captive.[17] During World War II the Amish entered Civilian Public Service.
Amish rely on their church and community for support, and thus reject the concept of insurance. An example of such support is barn raising, in which the entire community gathers together to build a barn in a single day. Such an event brings together family and friends to celebrate and bond.
Amish Acres, an Amish crafts and tourist attraction in Nappanee, Indiana.In 1961, the United States Internal Revenue Service announced that since the Amish refuse Social Security benefits and have a religious objection to insurance, they need not pay these taxes. In 1965, this policy was codified into law.[18] Self-employed individuals in certain sects do not pay into, nor receive benefits from, United States Social Security, nor do their similarly exempt employees. Internal Revenue Service form 4029 grants this exemption to members of a religious group that is conscientiously opposed to accepting benefits of any private or public insurance, provides a reasonable level of living for its dependent members and has existed continuously since December 31, 1950.[19] A visible sign of the care Amish provide for the elderly is the smaller Grossdaadi Heiser or Daadiheiser ("grandfather house"), often built near the main dwelling. Amish employees of non-Amish employers are taxed, but they do not apply for benefits.[20] Aside from Social Security and workers' compensation, American Amish pay all required taxes.[21]
At least one group of Amish farmers in Lancaster County Pennsylvania has formed a cooperative engaged in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) agreements with non-Amish families. Working through the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative [22] this group of Amish farmers provide organic vegetables to CSA groups in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, including New York. This interaction has resulted in annual dinners where non-Amish CSA members are hosted at the farms of their Amish providers.[23]
The Amish have, on occasion, encountered discrimination and hostility from their neighbors. During the two 20th century World Wars, Amish nonresistance sparked many incidents of harassment, and young Amish men forcibly inducted into the services were subjected to various forms of ill treatment.[citation needed] In the present day, anti-Amish sentiment has taken the form of pelting the horse-drawn carriages used by the Amish with stones or similar objects as the carriages pass along a road, most commonly at night.[24][25][26] A 1988, made-for-TV film, A Stoning In Fulham County, is based on a true story involving one such incident, in which a six-month-old Amish girl was struck in the head by a rock and died from her injuries. In 1997, Mary Kuepfer, a young Amish woman in Milverton, Ontario, Canada, was struck in the face by a beer bottle believed to have been thrown from a passing car.[27] She required thousands of dollars' worth of surgery to her face; this was paid for by an outpouring of donations from the public.
4 See also
See also
5 References
References1.^
Dewalt, Mark W (April 10, 2001). "Amish Schools in the United States and Canada — Abstract". Education Resources Information Center. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED455996&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&accno=ED455996.
2.^ Ediger, Marlow (1992). "Reading in Old Order Amish Schools — Abstract". Education Resources Information Center. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED354492&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&accno=ED354492.
3.^ Hostetler, p. 188.
4.^ Kraybill (2001), pp. 98–101.
5.^ The Peachey group split from the Old Order Amish in 1910 and eventually became affiliated with the Beachy Amish
6.^ Kraybill (2001), pp. 197–212.
7.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 313.
8.^ Kraybill (2001), pp. 114–115.
9.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 136.
10.^ "'Knowledge discovery' could speed creation of new products". Purdue University. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/041018.Caruthers.discover.html.
11.^ See, for example, [Dan Morse "Still Called by Faith to the Booth: As Pay Phones Vanish, Amish and Mennonites Build Their Own"], The Washington Post, September 3, 2006, p. C1; see also Diane Zimmerman Umble's work on the subject of the Amish and telephones
12.^ Kraybill, Donald Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits, Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004
13.^ Howard Rheingold (January 1999). "Look Who's Talking". Wired. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.html.
14.^ "GOP courts Amish votes in swing states". Associated Press. 2004. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5613947/ns/politics/t/gop-courts-amish-votes-swing-states/. Retrieved 2011-07-11.
15.^ Nieves, Evelyn (30 December 2004). "GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35064-2004Dec29?language=printer. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
16.^ Compston-Strough, Jennifer (2 November 2008). "Amish Looking Upward". The Intelligencer & Wheeling News Register. http://www.news-register.net/page/content.detail/id/516404.html. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
17.^ Nolt, pp. 66–67
18.^ U.S. Code collection
19.^ "Application for Exemption From Social Security and Medicare Taxes and Waiver of Benefits" (PDF). Internal Revenue Service. 2006. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4029.pdf. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
20.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 279.
21.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 273.
22.^ Lancaster Farm Fresh
23.^ Report on farm picnic at Healthy Harvest Organics
24.^ Iseman, David (18 May 1988). "Trumbull probes attack on woman, Amish buggy". The Vindicator. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=1uBRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=GoUMAAAAIBAJ&pg=5866,396113&hl=en. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
25.^ "Stone Amish". Painesville Telegraph. 12 September 1949. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-15ZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gUgNAAAAIBAJ&pg=6383,209217&dq=amish+stoning+-fulham+-muslim&hl=en. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
26.^ "State Police Arrest 25 Boys in Rural Areas". The Vindicator. 25 October 1958. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=q8Q_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=z1cMAAAAIBAJ&dq=amish%20stoning%20-fulham%20-muslim&pg=2772%2C3130040. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
27.^ "Amish girl hit with beer bottle". Nald.ca. http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/lifetime/issue4/page7.htm.
[edit] Bibliography
Kraybill, Donald B. (2001) [1989]. The riddle of Amish culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-6772-X, 9780801867729.
6 Bibliography
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-15ZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gUgNAAAAIBAJ&dq=amish%20stoning%20-fulham%20-muslim&pg=6383%2C209217
ABOVE LINKED ARTICLE TO STONING INCIDENT
A Stoning in Fulham County
19881hr 34mNRRate 5 starsRate 4 starsRate 3 starsRate 2 starsRate 1 starNot InterestedClearSaving.....Our best guess for Edward:
4.9 stars.Average of 17,423 ratings:
3.7 stars ..Based on a true story, this thought-provoking drama profiles two fathers: an Amish man whose young child is killed by reckless teens, and the prosecutor who tries to bring the youths to justice despite the condemnation he faces from the community.
Well done and important story of how the legal system upholds justice. I wept as I always do when harm comes to an innocent child. I have always admired and liked the Amish, and it is unfortunate that they are often harassed in this manner. The movie, dated as it is, also speaks of more innocent times, where rock throwing led to a terrible tragedy. In more recent times we have the horrific events such as the Amish school girls gunned down, and other violent intentional crimes. Ron Perlman and all the actors did an excellent job.
I am not AmIsh but I read a lot of books about the Amish lives. I would love to go back to the way things were in the old days, a simple life living by the word of God. This was a very well written and acted out movie. I am ashamed and embarrassed by the way these people are treated by others on a daily basis. They are no different than any other religion except that the old order drive horse and buggy, have no electricity, and live off the land and raise livestock. I think anyone who judges and mistreats them are most likely jealous. Great movie and very sad!
http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-synopsis/a-stoning-in-fulham-county/
Synopsis
A Stoning in Fulham County spends much of its screen time in a rural North Carolina Amish community. The tendency of the Amish to shun all modern convenience and to keep to themselves has fomented hostility from their neighbors. When the baby daughter of Amish couple Ron Perlman and Maureen Mueller is killed by a gang of rock-throwing teenagers, their anguish is virtually laughed off by the rest of the locals. Young county prosecutor Ken Olin tries to build a case against the assailant even though the grieving parents refuse to bring the case to court. He is also determined to press for conviction without calling to the stand the sole eyewitness--his own daughter (Olivia Burnette). A Stoning in Fulham County is distinguished by several top-rank acting performances, not the least of which is Ron Perlman's portrayal of a compassionate yet taciturn man who is spiritually incapable of adjusting his lifestyle for the convenience of others. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_life_in_the_modern_world
Amish life in the modern world From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
Amish country
Amish schoolchildrenAs time has passed, the Amish have felt pressures from the modern world. Their traditional rural way of life was becoming more and more different from modern society. Isolated groups of Amish population may have genetic disorders and other problems of closed communities. Amish make decisions on health, education and relationships based on their Biblical beliefs. Amish life has influenced some things in popular culture.
Contents [hide]
1 Education
Education
Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1941.The Amish do not educate their children past the eighth grade, believing that the basic knowledge offered up to that point is sufficient to prepare one for the Amish lifestyle.[1][2] Almost no Amish go to high school, much less to college. In many communities, the Amish operate their own schools, which are typically one-room schoolhouses with teachers (young unmarried women) from the Amish community. These schools provide education in many crafts, and are therefore eligible as vocational education, fulfilling the nationwide requirement of education through the 10th grade or its equivalent. There are Amish children who go to non-Amish public schools, even schools that are far away and that include a very small Amish population. For instance, there have been some Amish children who have attended Leesburg Elementary School in Leesburg, Indiana (about 12 mi (19 km) from Nappanee, Indiana), because their families lived on the edge of the school district. In the past, there have been major conflicts between the Amish and outsiders over these matters of local schooling. But for the most part, they have been resolved, and the educational authorities allow the Amish to educate their children in their own ways. Sometimes, there are conflicts between the state-mandated minimum age for discontinuing schooling, and the younger age of children who have completed the eighth grade. This is often handled by having the children repeat the eighth grade until they are old enough to leave school. In the past, when comparing standardized test scores of Amish students, the Amish have performed above the national average for rural public school pupils in spelling, word usage, and arithmetic. They performed below the national average, however, in vocabulary.[3]
The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court quoted sociology professor John A. Hostetler (1918–2001), who was born into an Amish family, wrote several books about the Amish, Hutterites, and Old Order Mennonites, and was then considered the foremost academic authority on the Amish. Donald Kraybill, Distinguished College Professor and Senior Fellow in the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, is one of the most active scholars studying the Amish today.[
2 Use of modern technology
Use of modern technology
Modern and Amish transportation in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.The Older Order Amish are known for their avoidance of certain modern technologies. Amish do not view technology as evil, and individuals may petition for acceptance of a particular technology in the local community. In Pennsylvania, bishops meet in the spring and fall to discuss common concerns, including the appropriate response to new technology, and then pass this information on to ministers and deacons in a subsequent meeting.[4] Because of this flat governing structure, variations of practice develop in each community.
Telephone booth set up by an "English" farmer for emergency use by local Amish families.High voltage electricity was rejected by 1920 through the actions of a strict bishop, as a reaction against more liberal Amish[5] and to avoid a physical connection to the outside world.[6] Because of the early prohibition of electricity, individual decisions about the use of new inventions such as the television would not be necessary. Electricity is used in some situations when it can be produced without access to outside power lines. Batteries, with their limited applications, are sometimes acceptable. Electric generators may be used for welding, recharging batteries, and powering milk stirrers in many communities. Outdoor electrical appliances such as riding and hand-pushed lawn mowers and string trimmers are used in some communities. Some Amish families have non-electric versions of appliances, such as kerosene-powered refrigerators. Some Old Order Amish districts may allow the use of thermal solar panels.[citation needed]
Amish communities adopt compromise solutions involving technology that seem strange to outsiders.[citation needed] Petrol-powered farm equipment, such as tillers or mowers, may be pushed by a human or pulled by a horse. The reasoning is that Amish farmers will not be tempted to purchase more land to out-compete other farmers in their community, if they have to move the equipment manually. Amish farmers employ chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and artificial insemination of cows.[7]
The Ordnung is the guide to community standards, rather than doctrine that defines sin. For example, the four Old Order Amish communities of Allen County, Indiana, are more conservative than most; they use open buggies, even during the winter, and they wear black leather shoes even in the hot summer.
Signs erected in areas with Old Order Amish, Old Order Mennonite or members of a few different Old Order Brethren groups, alerting motorists to the presence of horse-drawn vehicles.
Amish buggy rides offered in tourist-oriented Shipshewana, Indiana.Restrictions are not meant to impose suffering. Disabled people are allowed to use motorized wheelchairs; electricity is allowed in the home for medical equipment.[8] Those who break the rules may be given many months to resolve the problem so that they can use a computer to complete a business project or remove electric wiring from a new house.[9]
Although most Amish will not drive cars, they will hire drivers and vans, for example, for visiting family, monthly grocery shopping, or commuting to the workplace off the farm, though this too is subject to local regulation and variation. The practice increases the geographic reach of the Amish, and decreases isolation: a horse can travel only about 25 miles (40 km), and it must rest for a considerable period, restricting the Amish to a radius of 12.5 miles (20.1 km) from home. Moreover, a horse and buggy can only sustain 10 mph (16 km/h) over an extended distance, and thus is impractical for emergencies.[10] Regular bus service between Amish communities has been established in some areas, and train travel is accepted.
The Old Order Amish tend to restrict telephone use, as it is viewed by some as interfering with separation from the world. By bringing the outside world into the home, it is an intrusion into the privacy and sanctity of the family, and interferes with social community by eliminating face-to-face communication. Amish of Lancaster County use the telephone primarily for outgoing calls, with the added restriction that the telephone not be inside the house, but rather in a phone "booth" or small out-building placed far enough from the house as to make its use inconvenient. These private phones may be shared by more than one family. This allows the Amish to control their communication, and not have telephone calls invade their homes, but also to conduct business, as needed. In the past, the use of public pay phones in town for such calls was more common; today, with dwindling availability of pay phones because of increased cell phone use by the non-Amish population, Amish communities are seeing an increase in the private phone shanties.[11] Many Amish, particularly those who run businesses, use voicemail service.[12] The Amish will also use trusted "English" neighbors as contact points for passing on family emergency messages. Some New Order Amish will use cellphones and pagers, but most Old Order Amish will not.[13]
3 Relations with the outside world
Relations with the outside worldAs time has passed, the Amish have felt pressures from the modern world. Child labor laws, for example, are threatening their long-established ways of life, and raise questions regarding the treatment of children in an Amish household, and also in the way the Amish view emotional and medical support. A modern society places little emphasis on the emotional and spiritual bonds found in an Amish household that bind them together as a people. There is instead a negative perception regarding how the Amish choose to view some medical conditions as being 'The Will of God', without always receiving modern medical treatment found in hospitals or medical clinics; though many Amish communities maintain communal telephones to reach others in cases of emergency. Amish children often follow in their faith's long-standing tradition of being taught at an early age to work jobs in the home on the family's land or that of the community. Children are taught the traditions of their parents or immediate family until adolescence, when they are able to go into the world and compare their family's teachings with those of the world through rumspringa. Viewed as a respectful and enduring group, the Amish still spark controversy in modern society relating to their methods of raising young children, which vary greatly from the non-Amish.
Contrary to popular belief, some of the Amish vote, and they have been courted by national parties as potential swing voters: while their pacifism and social conscience cause some of them to be drawn to left-of-center politics, their generally conservative outlook causes many to favor the right wing.[14][15][16]
They are nonresistant, and rarely defend themselves physically or even in court; in wartime, they take conscientious objector status. Their own folk-history contains tales of heroic nonresistance, such as the insistence of Jacob Hochstetler (1704–1775) that his sons stop shooting at hostile Indians, who proceeded to kill some of the family and take others captive.[17] During World War II the Amish entered Civilian Public Service.
Amish rely on their church and community for support, and thus reject the concept of insurance. An example of such support is barn raising, in which the entire community gathers together to build a barn in a single day. Such an event brings together family and friends to celebrate and bond.
Amish Acres, an Amish crafts and tourist attraction in Nappanee, Indiana.In 1961, the United States Internal Revenue Service announced that since the Amish refuse Social Security benefits and have a religious objection to insurance, they need not pay these taxes. In 1965, this policy was codified into law.[18] Self-employed individuals in certain sects do not pay into, nor receive benefits from, United States Social Security, nor do their similarly exempt employees. Internal Revenue Service form 4029 grants this exemption to members of a religious group that is conscientiously opposed to accepting benefits of any private or public insurance, provides a reasonable level of living for its dependent members and has existed continuously since December 31, 1950.[19] A visible sign of the care Amish provide for the elderly is the smaller Grossdaadi Heiser or Daadiheiser ("grandfather house"), often built near the main dwelling. Amish employees of non-Amish employers are taxed, but they do not apply for benefits.[20] Aside from Social Security and workers' compensation, American Amish pay all required taxes.[21]
At least one group of Amish farmers in Lancaster County Pennsylvania has formed a cooperative engaged in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) agreements with non-Amish families. Working through the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative [22] this group of Amish farmers provide organic vegetables to CSA groups in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, including New York. This interaction has resulted in annual dinners where non-Amish CSA members are hosted at the farms of their Amish providers.[23]
The Amish have, on occasion, encountered discrimination and hostility from their neighbors. During the two 20th century World Wars, Amish nonresistance sparked many incidents of harassment, and young Amish men forcibly inducted into the services were subjected to various forms of ill treatment.[citation needed] In the present day, anti-Amish sentiment has taken the form of pelting the horse-drawn carriages used by the Amish with stones or similar objects as the carriages pass along a road, most commonly at night.[24][25][26] A 1988, made-for-TV film, A Stoning In Fulham County, is based on a true story involving one such incident, in which a six-month-old Amish girl was struck in the head by a rock and died from her injuries. In 1997, Mary Kuepfer, a young Amish woman in Milverton, Ontario, Canada, was struck in the face by a beer bottle believed to have been thrown from a passing car.[27] She required thousands of dollars' worth of surgery to her face; this was paid for by an outpouring of donations from the public.
4 See also
See also
5 References
References1.^
Dewalt, Mark W (April 10, 2001). "Amish Schools in the United States and Canada — Abstract". Education Resources Information Center. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED455996&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&accno=ED455996.
2.^ Ediger, Marlow (1992). "Reading in Old Order Amish Schools — Abstract". Education Resources Information Center. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED354492&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&accno=ED354492.
3.^ Hostetler, p. 188.
4.^ Kraybill (2001), pp. 98–101.
5.^ The Peachey group split from the Old Order Amish in 1910 and eventually became affiliated with the Beachy Amish
6.^ Kraybill (2001), pp. 197–212.
7.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 313.
8.^ Kraybill (2001), pp. 114–115.
9.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 136.
10.^ "'Knowledge discovery' could speed creation of new products". Purdue University. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/041018.Caruthers.discover.html.
11.^ See, for example, [Dan Morse "Still Called by Faith to the Booth: As Pay Phones Vanish, Amish and Mennonites Build Their Own"], The Washington Post, September 3, 2006, p. C1; see also Diane Zimmerman Umble's work on the subject of the Amish and telephones
12.^ Kraybill, Donald Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits, Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004
13.^ Howard Rheingold (January 1999). "Look Who's Talking". Wired. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.html.
14.^ "GOP courts Amish votes in swing states". Associated Press. 2004. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5613947/ns/politics/t/gop-courts-amish-votes-swing-states/. Retrieved 2011-07-11.
15.^ Nieves, Evelyn (30 December 2004). "GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35064-2004Dec29?language=printer. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
16.^ Compston-Strough, Jennifer (2 November 2008). "Amish Looking Upward". The Intelligencer & Wheeling News Register. http://www.news-register.net/page/content.detail/id/516404.html. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
17.^ Nolt, pp. 66–67
18.^ U.S. Code collection
19.^ "Application for Exemption From Social Security and Medicare Taxes and Waiver of Benefits" (PDF). Internal Revenue Service. 2006. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4029.pdf. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
20.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 279.
21.^ Kraybill (2001), p. 273.
22.^ Lancaster Farm Fresh
23.^ Report on farm picnic at Healthy Harvest Organics
24.^ Iseman, David (18 May 1988). "Trumbull probes attack on woman, Amish buggy". The Vindicator. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=1uBRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=GoUMAAAAIBAJ&pg=5866,396113&hl=en. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
25.^ "Stone Amish". Painesville Telegraph. 12 September 1949. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-15ZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gUgNAAAAIBAJ&pg=6383,209217&dq=amish+stoning+-fulham+-muslim&hl=en. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
26.^ "State Police Arrest 25 Boys in Rural Areas". The Vindicator. 25 October 1958. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=q8Q_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=z1cMAAAAIBAJ&dq=amish%20stoning%20-fulham%20-muslim&pg=2772%2C3130040. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
27.^ "Amish girl hit with beer bottle". Nald.ca. http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/lifetime/issue4/page7.htm.
[edit] Bibliography
Kraybill, Donald B. (2001) [1989]. The riddle of Amish culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-6772-X, 9780801867729.
6 Bibliography
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-15ZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gUgNAAAAIBAJ&dq=amish%20stoning%20-fulham%20-muslim&pg=6383%2C209217
ABOVE LINKED ARTICLE TO STONING INCIDENT
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Cet Amour-La
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.
.
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.
.
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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