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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Duras
Marguerite Duras From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search Marguerite Duras
Born 4 April 1914(1914-04-04)
Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam)
Died 3 March 1996(1996-03-03)
Paris
Occupation Writer
Nationality French
Period 20th century
Genres Novel, drama
Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras (pronounced: [maʁ.ɡə.ʁit dy.ʁas]) (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Background
1.2 Authorship
2 Bibliography
3 Filmography as director
4 Further reading
5 References
6 External links
[edit] Biography[edit] BackgroundShe was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony.
Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her three children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subsequent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period.
At 17, Marguerite went to France, her parents' native country, where she began studying for a degree in mathematics. This she soon abandoned to concentrate on political sciences, and then law. After completing her studies, she became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party). In the late 1930s she worked for the French government office representing the colony of Indochina. During the war, from 1942 to 1944, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper to publishers (in the process operating a de facto book censorship system), but she was also a member of the French Resistance. Her husband, Robert Antelme, was deported to Buchenwald for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely survived the experience (weighing on his release, according to Marguerite, just 84 lbs).
In 1943, for her first novel published Les Impudents, she decided to use as pen name the surname of Duras, a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located.
AuthorshipShe was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays and short fiction, including her best-selling, apparently autobiographical work L'Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover, which describes her youthful affair with a Chinese man. This text won the Goncourt prize in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other forms: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri, was released to great success in 1992. A film version of The Sea Wall was first released in 1958, and remade in 2008 by Cambodian director Rithy Panh.
Other major works include Moderato Cantabile, also made into a film of the same name, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and her play India Song, which Duras herself later directed as a film (1975). She was also the screenwriter of the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which was directed by Alain Resnais.
Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form (their 'romanticism' was criticised by fellow writer Raymond Queneau); however, with Moderato Cantabile she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She was associated with the Nouveau roman French literary movement, although she did not belong definitively to any group. Many of her works, such as Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) and L'Homme assis dans le couloir (1980) deal with human sexuality.[1] Her films are also experimental in form; most eschew synchronized sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a story; spoken text is juxtaposed with images whose relation to what is said may be more-or-less indirect.
Despite her success as a writer, Duras's adult life was also marked by personal challenges, including a recurring struggle with alcoholism. Duras died of throat cancer in Paris, aged 81. She is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
She is noted for her command of dialogue.[2]
L’Amant, her 1984 novel(See The Lover (film), 1992) won the Prix Goncourt.[2]
Bibliography
Les Impudents, Plon, 1943
La Vie tranquille, Gallimard, 1944.
Un barrage contre le Pacifique, Gallimard, 1950 (tr. The Sea Wall, 1967)
Le Marin de Gibraltar, Gallimard, 1952 (tr. The Sailor from Gibraltar, 1966)
Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia, Gallimard, 1953 (tr. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 1960)
Des journées entières dans les arbres, "Le Boa", "Madame Dodin", "Les Chantiers", Gallimard, 1954 (tr. Whole Days in the Trees, 1984)
Le Square, Gallimard, 1955 (tr. The Square, 1959)
Moderato Cantabile, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958 (tr. Moderato Cantabile, 1977)
Les Viaducs de la Seine et Oise, Gallimard, 1959.
Dix heures et demie du soir en été, Paris, 1960 (tr. Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, London, 1961)
Hiroshima mon amour, Gallimard, 1960 (tr. Hiroshima mon amour, 1961)
"Les deux ghettos," in: France-Observateur, November 9, 1961, p. 8-10
L'après-midi de M. Andesmas, Gallimard, 1960 (tr. The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas, 1964)
Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Gallimard, 1964, (tr. The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 1964)
Théâtre I: les Eaux et Forêts-le Square-La Musica, Gallimard, 1965 (tr. The Rivers and the Forests, 1964; The Square; La Musica, 1975)
Le Vice-Consul, Gallimard, 1965 (tr. The Vice-Consul, 1968)
L'Amante Anglaise, Gallimard, 1967 (tr. L'Amante Anglaise, 1968)
Théâtre II: Suzanna Andler-Des journées entières dans les arbres-Yes, peut-être-Le Shaga-Un homme est venu me voir, Gallimard, 1968.
Détruire, dit-elle, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969 (tr. Destroy, She Said)
Abahn Sabana David, Gallimard, 1970.
L'Amour (Love), Gallimard, 1971.
Ah! Ernesto, Hatlin Quist, 1971.
India Song, Gallimard, 1973 (tr. India Song, 1976)
Nathalie Granger, suivi de "La Femme du Gange", Gallimard, 1973.
Le Camion, suivi de "Entretien avec Michelle Porte", Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977.
L'Eden Cinéma, Mercure de France, 1977 (tr. Eden Cinema, 1992)
Le Navire Night, suivi de Cesarée, les Mains négatives, Aurélia Steiner, Mercure de France, 1979.
Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique, Albatros, 1980.
L'Homme assis dans le couloir, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980 (tr. The Man Sitting in the Corridor)
L'Été 80, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980.
Les Yeux verts, Cahiers du cinéma, n.312-313, June 1980 and a new edition, 1987 (tr. Green Eyes)
Agatha, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981 (tr. Agatha)
Outside, Albin Michel, 1981 (tr. Outside)
L'Homme atlantique, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982.
Savannah Bay, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982, 2ème edition augmentée, 1983 (tr. Savannah Bay, 1992)
La Maladie de la mort, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982 (tr. The Malady of Death)
Théâtre III: -La Bête dans la jungle, d'après H. James, adaptation de J. Lord et M. Duras, -Les Papiers d'Aspern, d'après H. James, adaptation de M. Duras et R. Antelme, -La Danse de mort, d'après A. Strindberg, adaptation de M. Duras, Gallimard, 1984.
L'Amant, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1984. Awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt (tr. The Lover)
La Douleur, POL, 1985 (tr. The War)
La Musica deuxième, Gallimard, 1985.
Les Yeux bleus Cheveux noirs, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986 (tr. Blue Eyes, Black Hair)
La Pute de la côte normande, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986.
La Vie matérielle, POL, 1987 (tr. Practicalities)
Emily L., Les Éditions de Minuit, 1987 (tr. Emily L.)
La Pluie d'été, POL, 1990 (tr. Summer Rain)
L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, Gallimard, 1991 (tr. The North China Lover, 1992)
Yann Andréa Steiner, Gallimard, 1992 (tr. Yann Andrea Steiner)
Écrire, Gallimard, 1993
C'est tout, POL, 1995 (tr. No More
__________
Filmography as directorLes Enfants (1984)
Il Dialogo di Roma (1982)
L'Homme atlantique (1981)
Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981)
Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979)
Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979)
Le Navire Night (1979)
Césarée (1978)
Les Mains négatives (1978)
Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977)
Le Camion (1977)
Des journées entières dans les arbres (1976)
Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976)
India Song (1975)
La Femme du Gange (1974)
Nathalie Granger (1972)
Jaune le soleil (1972)
Détruire, dit-elle (1969)
La Musica (1967)__________Further readingCrowley, Martin (2000). Duras, Writing, and the Ethical. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198160135. ISBN 9780198160137.
Glassman, Deborah N. (1991). Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. Rutherford London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Associated University Presses. ISBN 0838633374. http://books.google.com/books?id=JX0-S9Pu4cIC&pg=PP4&lpg=PP4&dq=deborah+n.+glassman+marguerite+duras&source=bl&ots=Jn7HCP_Jbi&sig=IUSp-iM35nXsWK0dd41qbqQchgw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3EJ8T_r_AaLi0QHmuvT6Cw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=deborah%20n.%20glassman%20marguerite%20duras&f=false. ISBN 9780838633373,
Harvey, Robert; Alazet, Bernard; Volat, Hélène (2009). Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras. Bibliographie des oeuvres et de la critique, 1940-2006. Paris: IMEC. pp. 530.
Hill, Leslie (July 10, 1993). Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415050480. http://books.google.com/books?id=AsBdN04TK9cC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=Hill,+Leslie+(1993).+Marguerite+Duras:+Apocalyptic+Desires.+Routledge+isbn&source=bl&ots=lv4pyfmfiW&sig=Pcd_0UWqbattQ13ydt_V6FkBejY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6UB8T9uHH8eUtwfb3cXmDA&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Hill%2C%20Leslie%20(1993).%20Marguerite%20Duras%3A%20Apocalyptic%20Desires.%20Routledge%20isbn&f=false. ISBN 978-0415050487.
Schuster, Marilyn R. (1993). Marguerite Duras Revisited. New York: Twayne. ISBN 0805782982. ISBN 9780805782981.
Vircondelet, Alain (1994). Duras: A Biography. Normal, Illinois. ISBN 1564780651. ISBN 9781564780652.
[edit] References1.^ Alex Hughes, "Erotic Writing" in Hughes and Keith Reader, Encyclopedia of contemporary French culture, (pp. 187-88). London, Routledge, 1998, ISBN 0415131863
2.^ a b "Marguerite Duras". Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.). 2012. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/174178/Marguerite-Duras. Retrieved April 4, 2012.
[edit] External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marguerite Duras
Biography portal
"In Love with Duras" an essay in The New York Review of Books, by Edmund White, June 26, 2008
"The Timeless Marguerite Duras"[dead link]: an article in the TLS by Emilie Bickerton, 25 July 2007
Marguerite Duras at Find a Grave___________________________________________________________
Cet Amour-La
20031hr 34mNRRate 5 starsRate 4 starsRate 3 starsRate 2 starsRate 1 starNot InterestedClearSaving.....Our best guess for Edward:
4.8 stars.Average of 18,034 ratings:
2.8 stars ..Jeanne Moreau stars in this biographical look at T, the Indochina-born French author whose popular books were adapted into plays and films. Duras is wasting away the last years of her storied life plagued with writer's block and adrift in an alcoholic haze … that is, until she meets Yann Andrea (Aymeric Demarigny), a man considerably younger than Duras, and falls passionately in love with him.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D07E7DE1139F931A35757C0A9659C8B63
Cet Amour-La (2001)
April 2, 2003
FILM REVIEW; Marguerite Duras, as a Writer Who's Just a Bit Grumpy
By DAVE KEHR
Published: April 2, 2003
Simulated art has a sad tendency to perform better commercially than the real thing, a fact that specialized film distributors have long been aware of. It is easier to release a puffy gloss on an artist's life (there have been many recent examples, a few among this year's Oscar nominations) than it is to draw a wide public into the dark and messy domain of an artist's actual work.
That rule is borne out, once again, by ''Cet Amour-là,'' a French feature by Josée Dayan that chronicles the love affair between the great experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (played by Jeanne Moreau) and Yann Andréa (Aymeric Demarigny), an admirer some 40 years her junior.
Their relationship began in 1975 when Mr. Andréa met Duras (who died at 81 in 1996) at a screening of her film ''India Song'' at his university. They began a correspondence that lasted until 1980, when Duras took Mr. Andréa into her home, as her confidant, caretaker and, apparently, lover, though the film is tactfully vague on that final point.
With Mr. Andréa contributing to the dialogue, Ms. Dayan (who has spent most of her long career creating movies for French television), has made a film that repeatedly insists on Duras's greatness while sparing the audience the often difficult and uncomfortable task of actually enduring her works.
One of the musical cues used throughout the film is the haunting tango composed by Carlos d'Alessio for ''India Song,'' which is generally regarded as Duras's best work as a filmmaker (she made 19 movies as a director and contributed as a writer to 40 others, in addition to her work as a novelist and journalist). But the musical theme that Duras, through ruthless repetition, turned into a symphony of painful, frustrated desire is employed in ''Cet Amour-la'' as a tinkly, sentimental undertone, as trite and toothless as ''Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.''
In Ms. Dayan's version, the famously difficult Duras comes off as a grumpy but lovable eccentric, a sort of Auntie Mame with bad moods, who encourages the puppyish Yann to find his own voice and follow his dream.
Her chronic alcoholism is swept away by a single visit to a clinic, at which point Duras is able to sit down and create what is perhaps the one bluntly commercial novel of her career, ''The Lover,'' an autobiographical tale of a girl's sexual initiation, which was filmed by Jeanne-Jacques Annaud in 1992 and which Ms. Duras subsequently disowned.
Ms. Moreau, still an imperious presence at age 75, makes no effort to look or sound like Duras -- this is one sacred monster stepping in for another. As Mr. Andréa, Mr. Demarigny is pouty and emotionally vague.
''Cet Amour-là'' opens today at the Lincoln Plaza and Quad Cinemas. ''India Song'' never opened commercially in New York at all.
CET AMOUR-LÀ
Directed by Josée Dayan; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Ms. Dayan in collaboration with Yann Andréa, Maren Sell and Gilles Taurand; director of photography, Caroline Champetier; edited by Anne Boissel; music by Angelo Badalamenti; production designer, Sylvie Fennec; produced by Alain Sarde; released by New Yorker Films. Running time: 98 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Jeanne Moreau (Marguerite Duras) and Aymeric Demarigny (Yann Andréa).
http://www.plume-noire.com/movies/reviews/cetamour-la.html
Cet Amour-Là review
:. Director: Josée Dayan
:. Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Aymeric Demarigny
:. Script: Yann Andréa , Josée Dayan
:. Running Time: 1:40
:. Year: 2001
:. Original Title: Cet Amour-Là
:. Country: France
:. Official Site: Cet Amour-Là
What this film really offers is a chance to study the marvelous Jeanne Moreau: her aged yet beautiful face, her still quite energetic and strong body, her velvet voice, her startling smile. Her persona, period. Without its stunning star, the film goes nowhere. With her, it also goes nowhere, but at least you get to go nowhere with Jeanne Moreau.
The movie is about the last 16 years in the life of French novelist/playwright/scenarist Marguerite Duras (Moreau). Most famous here for her Academy Award nominated screenplay, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Duras spent these years in the company of Yann Andréa, a man 38 years her junior (also, the author of the book upon which this film was based.) In the film, we really have no idea who this man is and apparently neither did Duras. Nor did she want to know. Yann simply moves in with Duras after he presents himself, adoring, to her. She accepts him and then, for what feels like 16 years to the audience, she repetitively throws him out, drinks herself into a stupor, verbally trashes him, writes her final works (with his secretarial help) and spouts out loud her theories about life, love, death and writing. There are no real conversations, nothing much else happens (he does take her to rehab toward the end of the movie, but by that point, do we care?) and she finally dies. Then he writes the book and the movie apparently gets made.
The film is probably trying to be stylistically a mirror of the writer's style and her philosophy. But it just doesn't work as a movie. What we see are the beginnings of scenes, the initiation of intense conflict, and before anything develops there's a fade to black. Then, fade in to another moment, another day or night, and usually a repeat of some earlier conflict. Or, rather, a repeat of the beginning of another conflict or issue or piece of action. And again, before anything can really develop, the sequence yields to another fade out. The one or two scenes that do have a beginning, middle and end are memorable, as are the ones that are montage-like. For example, we see the couple walking along the beach, holding each other close. As if it were part of a montage. But such a scene is not connected to one before or after in any particular way. Strangely, scenes with food in them are memorable: one in which the couple are ordering at a restaurant (this is following her discharge from the alcohol treatment center) and Duras wants to choose the brand of lemonade, as if she were ordering a bottle of wine. I think we remember and enjoy the food scenes because food is concrete, earthy, touchable, sensual, and so little else in this film is. That is, save Jeanne Moreau.
The character (the only other character in the film!) of Yann Andréa, her lover, seemed "translucent," as a friend so described him. There is a sense of light, yet no real clarity about him. Early in the film Duras says that all she knows about him is his name, which has "Stein" attached at the end of it, and that he's a Jew. Nothing more is given about him, and nothing more is revealed or implied in the movie. This bland, blank, seemingly simple man appeared only to want to be with Duras, either to take care of her, or to lean on her. But we never really know or understand him. Here is real potential for drama, but it's completely wasted. Who and why was this person attaching himself Duras? We, the audience, never find out, and the characters in the movie certainly have no clue. That may be the message, but man, such is dull movie-making. If it weren't for the superior cinematography (Caroline Champetier) which opens up the intensity of the two-person box (really only one person) with the gorgeous Breton countryside, I doubt if even Ms. Moreau would have been enough. The original music by David Lynch's often-used Angelo Badalamenti is barely noticeable. Perhaps the vision for this film (as suggested by the hiring of Badalamenti) was to play into the otherworldliness of love and death. But movies are so damn real, only the most creative of filmmakers can manage much success communicating abstractions. Here, the failure in communication was such that I had trouble staying awake.
Yet, many in the audience (at the San Francisco Film Festival) seemed to appreciate the film. I think filmgoers these days are so thankful for anything demonstrating intelligence on the screen that they go away happy, even if they may be mystified. Or maybe (as I suspect) their appreciation was for the fine actress, who clearly threw herself into the person of Marguerite Duras with great honesty. Or, maybe, ideas that emanate around Jeanne Moreau are perhaps automatically watchable. But for me, I seem to at least need Moreau to have maybe a good meal set before her, something sensual, real and understandable. Then we can talk.
.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Westboro in My Town?
http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/westboro-in-my-town/
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
A protester from Westboro Baptist Church.
I noticed the police cars first. Not one, but three. An accident? A bike race? As I got closer to the JCC, though, I saw them.
Not the police. The picketers.
God hates Jews. Jews killed Christ.
Their large neon signs shocked the crap out of me. I have to admit I felt a little scared, even though it was just four adults and one child (don’t get me started on that) behind a barrier, surrounded by police on both sides of the street. Looking back, it was a pretty pathetic demonstration, but in the moment, it felt huge. I wanted to roll down my window and unleash a torrent of angry obscenities on them, but I knew that would only inflame the situation. I drove on.
Jews are going to hell. God hates Jews.
In less than a minute, I was turning into the long driveway up to the JCC, and my mind immediately went to my daughters. What if they had been in the car? Well, it wouldn’t matter much now, as they can’t read. I could have told them it was a side-of-the-road party, and we could have talked about how there were pink letters on the sign. “Pink my favorite color,” Frieda would have told me. And we would have moved on.
But what about when the girls are older? When they can read? How would I explain to them that these people are condemning us? How do I tell them that there is blatant anti-Semitism in the United States? In Massachusetts, a progressive state that I am immensely proud to call my home, and in our own town, where we are supposed to feel safe? How would I explain that?
As I made my way through the JCC, I saw a group of women of all ages in an Israeli dance exercise class. It brought tears to my eyes. F*ck you guys, I thought. You can wave your stupid little signs, but you can’t stop us from dancing.
I soon learned that this angry little band was from the Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-Semitic, homophobic, family of all-purpose haters out of Kansas who has received press for picketing soldiers’ funerals, and more recently, those of Elizabeth Edwards and Elizabeth Taylor. Their frequent and senseless protests have rendered them virtually irrelevant on the national scene, even among the bigots who might have otherwise supported them.
All of sudden, my perspective went from that of a hurt and angry mother to one of interested and disgusted spectator. “When you think about it,” I said to my trainer, “Everyone hates the Jews. Whatever. That’s such a cliché. But who protests at a soldier’s funeral? That’s just absurd. Honestly, they’re like a caricature of an anti-Semite. They might as well be wearing fake Hitler mustaches.”
Humor makes it easier, but the truth is, they were still there, a stark reminder of the hatred and violence that has tormented the Jews throughout our history. And therein lays the challenge that my husband and I, along with thousands of other Jewish parents, face on a regular basis. How do we teach our children about hate and anti-Semitism? With Purim behind us, and Passover just around the corner, a good place to start might be by telling the stories of tragedy and survival of the Jewish people, and by celebrating what we have. Yes, in the years to come my husband and I will tell the girls about their family members who perished in the Holocaust, as well as those who survived. And they will learn of anti-Semitism, and unfortunately, they will probably experience it. But for now, we will celebrate our freedom, eat Bubbe’s matzo ball soup, and know that our community and our people are stronger than any little angry group of protesters with neon signs will ever be.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Historians, Biographers
By: Dr. Abigail Green
Tagged enlightenment, europe, germany, history, holocaust
Dr. Abigail Green’s new book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, is now available
What makes a good biography? I thought about this question a lot when I was writing my book about Moses Montefiore, and I’ve been thinking about it again recently. As a historian, my preference has always been for biographies that illuminate the broader context – books like Elisheva Carlebach’s The Pursuit of Heresy, which brought the world of the itinerant Jerusalem rabbi Moses Hagiz so vividly to life, or Perfecting the World – a wonderful book about Montefiore’s life-long friend, the Quaker philanthropist and physician Thomas Hodgkin.
Of course, such books don’t necessarily make for easy reading.
A couple of weeks ago I contributed to In Our Time, one of the most popular and long-lived discussion programs on British radio. The subject was Moses Mendelssohn, a fascinating character about whom I know rather less than I should. Preparing for this broadcast, I came across Shmuel Feiner’s brilliantly readable little biography of the German-Jewish philosopher, which just came out in the Yale Jewish Lives series. I loved the way it opened with youths throwing stones at Mendelssohn and his family as they walked down Unter den Linden, Berlin’s smartest promenade; and ended, by alluding both to this episode and to German Jewry’s terrible future. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that this pearl of a book was
written by the author of The Jewish Enlightenment, a superb piece of scholarship but famously heavy-going.
Biographers tend to get bogged down in detail, and my own book is no exception. Something about the brief, interpretative format of the Yale series seems to have liberated Feiner. He tells us everything we need to know about Mendelssohn’s thought and brings the man to life, all in about 70,000 words. Each of which is precious. It’s a far cry from Altmann’s classic, 900 page intellectual biography and infinitely more enlightening.
Feiner’s elegantly concise approach contrasts starkly with the other biography I’m reading at the moment: Jonathan Steinberg’s psychologically driven Bismarck, which I’m reviewing for the European History Quarterly. It’s a bulky volume, and like me he had difficulty cutting a life down to size. Steinberg’s earlier books, such as All or Nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust seemed to me to ask the right questions (why did the Italians and the Germans behave differently during the Holocaust?) without coming up with really satisfactory answers. This time, however, he seems to have struck gold. The style is genuinely sparkling, and focusing on an individual rather than broader societal structures seems to play to Steinberg’s strengths. Two things that resonated for me were Steinberg’s emphasis on the emotional dimension of Bismarck’s approach to politics and the way in which the story of Bismarck’s life was intertwined with the evolving and deeply ingrained hostility Junkers like Bismarck felt towards Jews as alien symbols of change and modernity.
Oddly then, these are both books about the German-Jewish symbiosis. Despite their different qualities, they share the same fundamental virtue. Both Feiner and Steinberg are drawing on a lifetime of knowledge – and you can tell that in writing these biographies they had the time of their lives.
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
Apr 7 2011 Westboro in My Town?
By Carla Naumburg at 3:21 pm
A protester from Westboro Baptist Church.
I noticed the police cars first. Not one, but three. An accident? A bike race? As I got closer to the JCC, though, I saw them.
Not the police. The picketers.
God hates Jews. Jews killed Christ.
Their large neon signs shocked the crap out of me. I have to admit I felt a little scared, even though it was just four adults and one child (don’t get me started on that) behind a barrier, surrounded by police on both sides of the street. Looking back, it was a pretty pathetic demonstration, but in the moment, it felt huge. I wanted to roll down my window and unleash a torrent of angry obscenities on them, but I knew that would only inflame the situation. I drove on.
Jews are going to hell. God hates Jews.
In less than a minute, I was turning into the long driveway up to the JCC, and my mind immediately went to my daughters. What if they had been in the car? Well, it wouldn’t matter much now, as they can’t read. I could have told them it was a side-of-the-road party, and we could have talked about how there were pink letters on the sign. “Pink my favorite color,” Frieda would have told me. And we would have moved on.
But what about when the girls are older? When they can read? How would I explain to them that these people are condemning us? How do I tell them that there is blatant anti-Semitism in the United States? In Massachusetts, a progressive state that I am immensely proud to call my home, and in our own town, where we are supposed to feel safe? How would I explain that?
As I made my way through the JCC, I saw a group of women of all ages in an Israeli dance exercise class. It brought tears to my eyes. F*ck you guys, I thought. You can wave your stupid little signs, but you can’t stop us from dancing.
I soon learned that this angry little band was from the Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-Semitic, homophobic, family of all-purpose haters out of Kansas who has received press for picketing soldiers’ funerals, and more recently, those of Elizabeth Edwards and Elizabeth Taylor. Their frequent and senseless protests have rendered them virtually irrelevant on the national scene, even among the bigots who might have otherwise supported them.
All of sudden, my perspective went from that of a hurt and angry mother to one of interested and disgusted spectator. “When you think about it,” I said to my trainer, “Everyone hates the Jews. Whatever. That’s such a cliché. But who protests at a soldier’s funeral? That’s just absurd. Honestly, they’re like a caricature of an anti-Semite. They might as well be wearing fake Hitler mustaches.”
Humor makes it easier, but the truth is, they were still there, a stark reminder of the hatred and violence that has tormented the Jews throughout our history. And therein lays the challenge that my husband and I, along with thousands of other Jewish parents, face on a regular basis. How do we teach our children about hate and anti-Semitism? With Purim behind us, and Passover just around the corner, a good place to start might be by telling the stories of tragedy and survival of the Jewish people, and by celebrating what we have. Yes, in the years to come my husband and I will tell the girls about their family members who perished in the Holocaust, as well as those who survived. And they will learn of anti-Semitism, and unfortunately, they will probably experience it. But for now, we will celebrate our freedom, eat Bubbe’s matzo ball soup, and know that our community and our people are stronger than any little angry group of protesters with neon signs will ever be.
_____________________________________________________________________________
By: Dr. Abigail Green
Tagged enlightenment, europe, germany, history, holocaust
Dr. Abigail Green’s new book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, is now available
What makes a good biography? I thought about this question a lot when I was writing my book about Moses Montefiore, and I’ve been thinking about it again recently. As a historian, my preference has always been for biographies that illuminate the broader context – books like Elisheva Carlebach’s The Pursuit of Heresy, which brought the world of the itinerant Jerusalem rabbi Moses Hagiz so vividly to life, or Perfecting the World – a wonderful book about Montefiore’s life-long friend, the Quaker philanthropist and physician Thomas Hodgkin.
Of course, such books don’t necessarily make for easy reading.
A couple of weeks ago I contributed to In Our Time, one of the most popular and long-lived discussion programs on British radio. The subject was Moses Mendelssohn, a fascinating character about whom I know rather less than I should. Preparing for this broadcast, I came across Shmuel Feiner’s brilliantly readable little biography of the German-Jewish philosopher, which just came out in the Yale Jewish Lives series. I loved the way it opened with youths throwing stones at Mendelssohn and his family as they walked down Unter den Linden, Berlin’s smartest promenade; and ended, by alluding both to this episode and to German Jewry’s terrible future. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that this pearl of a book was
written by the author of The Jewish Enlightenment, a superb piece of scholarship but famously heavy-going.
Biographers tend to get bogged down in detail, and my own book is no exception. Something about the brief, interpretative format of the Yale series seems to have liberated Feiner. He tells us everything we need to know about Mendelssohn’s thought and brings the man to life, all in about 70,000 words. Each of which is precious. It’s a far cry from Altmann’s classic, 900 page intellectual biography and infinitely more enlightening.
Feiner’s elegantly concise approach contrasts starkly with the other biography I’m reading at the moment: Jonathan Steinberg’s psychologically driven Bismarck, which I’m reviewing for the European History Quarterly. It’s a bulky volume, and like me he had difficulty cutting a life down to size. Steinberg’s earlier books, such as All or Nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust seemed to me to ask the right questions (why did the Italians and the Germans behave differently during the Holocaust?) without coming up with really satisfactory answers. This time, however, he seems to have struck gold. The style is genuinely sparkling, and focusing on an individual rather than broader societal structures seems to play to Steinberg’s strengths. Two things that resonated for me were Steinberg’s emphasis on the emotional dimension of Bismarck’s approach to politics and the way in which the story of Bismarck’s life was intertwined with the evolving and deeply ingrained hostility Junkers like Bismarck felt towards Jews as alien symbols of change and modernity.
Oddly then, these are both books about the German-Jewish symbiosis. Despite their different qualities, they share the same fundamental virtue. Both Feiner and Steinberg are drawing on a lifetime of knowledge – and you can tell that in writing these biographies they had the time of their lives.
modern anti semitism well and presently alive LEO FRANK
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Modern_History/1700-1914/Modern_Anti-Semitism/Leo_Frank_Lynching.shtml
Leo Frank Is Lynched
Falsely accused of murdering a girl, a Jew is killed by a mob while imprisoned in Georgia.
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Though Jews found freedom and opportunity in America, they also found anti-Semitism. The following article describes one such instance. Reprinted with permission of the American Jewish Historical Society from "Chapters in American History."
In 1913, Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. After Georgia's governor commuted his death sentence, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was being held and lynched him. Leo Frank thus became the only known Jew lynched in American history.
The case still spurs debate and controversy –it even inspired a Broadway play. What are the facts of the Frank case?
The Case Against Frank
"Little Mary Phagan," as she became known, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view Atlanta's Confederate Day parade. She never returned home.
The next day, the factory night watchman found her bloody, sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When the police asked Leo Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, to view her body, Frank became agitated. He confirmed personally paying Mary her wages but could not say where she went next. Frank, the last to admit seeing Mary alive, became the prime suspect.
Georgia's solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, sought a grand jury indictment against Frank. Rumor circulated that Mary had been sexually assaulted. Factory employees offered apparently false testimony that Frank had made sexual advances toward them. The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that Frank had phoned her several times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl.
In this era, the cult of Southern chivalry made it a "hanging crime" for African-American males to have sexual contact with the "flower of white womanhood." The accusations against Frank, a Northern-born, college-educated Jew, proved equally inflammatory.
The Exonerating Evidence
For the grand jury, Hugh Dorsey painted Leo Frank as a sexual pervert who was both homosexual and who preyed on young girls. What he did not tell the grand jury was that a janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, had been arrested two days after Frank when he was seen washing blood off his shirt. Conley then admitted writing two notes that had been found by Mary Phagan's body. The police assumed that, as author of these notes, Conley was the murderer; but Conley claimed, after apparent coaching from Dorsey, that Leo Frank had confessed to murdering Mary in the lathe room and then paid Conley to pen the notes and help him move Mary's body to the basement.
Even after Frank's housekeeper placed him at home, having lunch at the time of the murder and despite gross inconsistencies in Conley's story, both the grand and trial jury chose to believe Conley. This was perhaps the first instance of a Southern black man's testimony being used to convict a white man. In August of 1913, the jury found Frank guilty in less than four hours. Crowds outside the courthouse shouted, "Hang the Jew."
Historian Leonard Dinnerstein reports that one juror had been overheard to say before his selection for the jury, "I am glad they indicted the God damn Jew. They ought to take him out and lynch him. And if I get on that jury, I'll hang that Jew for sure."
Facing intimidation and mob rule, the trial judge sentenced Frank to death. He barred Frank from the courtroom on the grounds that, had he been acquitted, Frank might have been lynched by the crowd outside.
Frank Is Saved, Briefly
Despite these breaches of due process, Georgia's higher courts rejected Frank's appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court voted, 7-2, against reopening the case, with justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes dissenting. Frank's survival depended on Georgia governor Frank Slaton. After a 12-day review of the evidence and letters recommending commutation from the trial judge (who must have had second thoughts) and from a private investigator who had worked for Hugh Dorsey, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment.
That night, state police kept a protesting crowd of 5,000 from the governor's mansion. Wary Jewish families fled Atlanta. Slaton held firm. "Two thousand years ago," he wrote a few days later, "another Governor washed his hands and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor's name has been accursed. If today another Jew [Leo Frank] were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice."
On August 17, 1915, a group of 25 men--described by peers as "sober, intelligent, of established good name and character"--stormed the prison hospital where Leo Frank was recovering from having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. They kidnapped Frank, drove him more than 100 miles to Mary Phagan's home town of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree.
Frank conducted himself with dignity, calmly proclaiming his innocence. Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank's swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants. When his term expired a year later, Slaton did not run for reelection and Dorsey easily won election to the governor's office.
In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally granted Leo Frank a posthumous pardon, not because they thought him innocent, but because his lynching deprived him of his right to further appeal. Mary Phagan's descendants and their supporters still insist on his guilt.
Video provided by Jewish Television Network
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid29474138001?bctid=1351306721
____________________________________________________________________________
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Jewish_World_Today/Jews_Around_the_Globe/Anti-Semitism_Today.shtml
Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century
Taboo no longer?
By Ira Rifkin
Ira Rifkin is a national correspondent for Religion News Service based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization: Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval.
It is an irony of Jewish life that it took the Holocaust to give anti-Semitism a bad name. So widespread was international revulsion over the annihilation of six million Jews that following World War II anti-Semitism, even of the polite variety, became the hatred one dared not publicly express. But only for a time.
At the dawn of the 21st century, virulent, open anti-Semitism has surfaced yet again, and in a big way. One need only read a Jewish newspaper or website--replete as they are with accounts of verbal anti-Semitism by high officials and intellectuals, and anti-Semitic physical attacks by common street thugs--to understand the depth of concern this has stirred among Jews.
The United States
The new anti-Semitism is most apparent in Western Europe and the Muslim world. But even in the United States, long viewed as the world's safest nation for Jews, anti-Semitism's resurgence may be seen in the proliferation of websites maintained by right-wing extremists and anti-Israel activists, and in the rhetoric of left-wing anti-globalization demonstrators on the streets of New York and Washington, many of whom equate Israel with fascism.
Modern Israel, the state its founders believed would provide safe sanctuary for Jews, is the prime target of contemporary anti-Semitism. It is recognizable in anti-Israel criticism that blurs the line between legitimate opposition to Israeli government policies and a barely concealed hatred that blames Israel's very existence--and by extension Jews everywhere, all of whom are presumed to support Israel's every decision--for much of the world's troubles.
The new anti-Semitism is also discernible in the claims that "neocons"--now a trendy pejorative for some well-connected, political conservatives (some of them Jews) who are aligned with Republican policies--are manipulating U.S. foreign policy for Israel's benefit. It amounts to a new twist on the age-old anti-Semitic canard that what Jews seek above all else is global hegemony.
How bad is the situation? "The combination of Jew hatred and the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by hostile governments makes the threat of this anti-Semitism the greatest since the Holocaust," Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman warned in a December 2003 newspaper column.
The Muslim World
Foxman's mention of "hostile governments" was a reference to Middle East Muslim nations that view Israel as a colonialist cancer injected into their midst without any moral or historical justification. Tensions have existed between Jews and Muslims since the seventh-century Jews of Mecca rejected the religious and political leadership of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Still, the violent and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ratcheted up Muslim animosity toward Jews--and the Jewish state--to unprecedented global levels. Making it worse are radical Islamists who, to advance their own cause, cast Jews, along with "crusader" Christians, as the enemies of all Muslims, Palestinian or otherwise.
Muslim anti-Semitism has ranged of late from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad's enthusiastically received claim at the 2003 Islamic Summit Conference that "Jews rule this world by proxy," to the Ramadan holy month broadcasts of multi-part dramatic TV series purporting to document Jewish plans to subjugate the world. Such series, widely shown across the Muslim Middle East, rely heavily on the infamous 19th century anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as "proof" of their claims.
Then there's the constant demonizing in Muslim newspapers and magazines of Jews as "pigs and sons of monkeys," and the fiery sermons of Muslim clerics who equate Jews with Nazis and maintain that virtually all Israeli measures to contain Palestinian terrorism amount to nothing less than a new "Holocaust." Yet another example from July 2003 is the charge in a Saudi Arabian newspaper that Jews of Iraqi ancestry will seek to return to their former homeland now that Saddam Hussein has been ousted "for the realization of expansionist Zionist goals."
Given the heightened state of political tensions that have inflamed the Middle East for nearly a century, Muslim anti-Semitism, it may be argued, can be understood as an inevitable, if tragic, group response to a seemingly unsolvable conflict. Surely there are also Jews who, as a result of the conflict, blindly view all Muslims as supportive of hateful terrorism without ever having spoken person-to-person to a single Muslim.
Europe
Less easily understood, however, is the resurgence of Western European anti-Semitism. There, French Jews have been attacked and Jewish schools burned by arsonists. Israeli academics--whose area of research has nothing to do with politics or Israeli policy--have been uninvited from European academic conferences that likewise aren't political in nature or subject matter. In Turkey, suicide bombers attacked two synagogues during Shabbat prayers in late 2003.
Writing in The Jerusalem Report, commentator Stuart Schoffman postulates that Western European anti-Semitism is both an attempt to shake off Holocaust guilt by arguing that Jews no longer warrant sympathy due to Israel's alleged wrongs, and "a twisted expression of atonement--in France and Belgium in particular, but elsewhere too--for (Europe's) own sordid colonial past."
Also a factor is Western Europe's burgeoning Muslim population. It is simply politically expedient--not to mention a hoped-for hedge against revengeful terrorist rage--for Western European nations with growing Muslim under-classes and shrinking, if not miniscule, Jewish communities, to excuse or even agree with Muslim anti-Semitism rather than confront it.
A European Union report on growing anti-Semitism on the continent unwittingly highlighted this last factor. The study concluded that Muslim youths were in large part responsible for the surge of anti-Semitic incidents across Europe. The EU withheld from publicizing the study--prompting Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and Cobi Benetoff, president of the European Jewish Congress, to jointly accuse EU leaders of exhibiting anti-Semitism. (EU commissioners said they decided to withhold the study because its methodology was flawed.)
A major development in today's anti-Semitism in Europe is its prevalence in the non-communist left. Europe's right-wingers have long used anti-Semitism as a political rallying cry. European communists, taking their cue from the former Soviet Union, also railed against Jews and Judaism as counter-revolutionary elements.
But the current surge in anti-Semitism has seen major artists, intellectuals, and politicians of the left also engaged. Among them have been Portuguese novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, who compared Israel to Nazi Germany; Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who called Jews the root of all the world's evil; and Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to Britain, who was overheard in an unguarded moment at a dinner party calling Israel "a shitty little country" that was bringing the world to the brink of World War III.
Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic
To be fair, legitimate criticism of Israel's actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians cannot all be labeled anti-Semitism, as some would have it. Complicating this is the fact that the Magen David [Star of David] is a symbol for both Judaism and Israel, which gives license to political cartoonists, for example, to depict the Star of David in work claiming to be critical only of Israel's actions and not of Jews more broadly. Israel's claim to be a homeland for global Jewry provides its enemies with additional reason--disingenuous as it may be--to claim that virtually all Jews give aid and comfort to the Jewish state.
Anti-Semitism, then, may be said at times to be in the eye of the beholder. Yet when Israel alone is singled out from among the family of nations as an illegitimate state, when Jewish nationhood is belittled as a modern political claim despite its 3,000-year-long history, and when United Nations officials allow an international conference on racism to focus almost entirely on the Jewish state, as happened in Durban, South Africa, just weeks before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is no surprise that Jews believe they are facing unabashed anti-Semitism rather than legitimate political disagreement.
"Let's be realistic," David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, wrote in mid-2003. "Given its longevity, anti-Semitism in one form or another is likely to outlive us all. That seems like a safe, if unfortunate, bet. No Jonas Salk has yet come along with an immunization protocol to eradicate forever the anti-Semitic virus, nor is any major breakthrough likely in the foreseeable future."
THE SAVVY JEWISH COMMUNITY OF TODAY IS A NECESSITY FOR COUNTERING THE ANCENT HATREDS OF OLD IN NEW GUISES
At the same time, Harris continued, "the Jewish community looks radically different than it did, say, 60 or 70 years ago" when anti-Semitism in Europe erupted into the Holocaust.
"Today, there is an Israel; then, there was not. Today, there are sophisticated, savvy, and well-connected Jewish institutions; then, Jewish institutions were much less confident and sure-footed. Collectively, we have the capacity to track trends in anti-Semitism, exchange information on a timely basis with other interested parties, reach centers of power, build alliances within and across borders, and consider the best mix of diplomatic, political, legal, and other strategies for countering troubling developments."
For Harris, at least, the ability of Jews to stand up to anti-Semitism is greater today then it ever has been. "We may not succeed in each and every case," he said, "but we've come a very long way thanks to a steely determination, in Israel and the Diaspora, to fight vigorously against anti-Semitism, while simultaneously helping to build a world in which anti-Semitism-and everything it stands for-is in irreversible decline."
There are, however, many Jews less confident about the future than is Harris. It remains to be seen whether Harris is correct about Jews' ability to withstand the latest tide of anti-Semitism--and whether those many non-Jews who today speak up in opposition to anti-Semitism will be there should their support become even more crucial.
Leo Frank Is Lynched
Falsely accused of murdering a girl, a Jew is killed by a mob while imprisoned in Georgia.
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Though Jews found freedom and opportunity in America, they also found anti-Semitism. The following article describes one such instance. Reprinted with permission of the American Jewish Historical Society from "Chapters in American History."
In 1913, Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. After Georgia's governor commuted his death sentence, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was being held and lynched him. Leo Frank thus became the only known Jew lynched in American history.
The case still spurs debate and controversy –it even inspired a Broadway play. What are the facts of the Frank case?
The Case Against Frank
"Little Mary Phagan," as she became known, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view Atlanta's Confederate Day parade. She never returned home.
The next day, the factory night watchman found her bloody, sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When the police asked Leo Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, to view her body, Frank became agitated. He confirmed personally paying Mary her wages but could not say where she went next. Frank, the last to admit seeing Mary alive, became the prime suspect.
Georgia's solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, sought a grand jury indictment against Frank. Rumor circulated that Mary had been sexually assaulted. Factory employees offered apparently false testimony that Frank had made sexual advances toward them. The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that Frank had phoned her several times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl.
In this era, the cult of Southern chivalry made it a "hanging crime" for African-American males to have sexual contact with the "flower of white womanhood." The accusations against Frank, a Northern-born, college-educated Jew, proved equally inflammatory.
The Exonerating Evidence
For the grand jury, Hugh Dorsey painted Leo Frank as a sexual pervert who was both homosexual and who preyed on young girls. What he did not tell the grand jury was that a janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, had been arrested two days after Frank when he was seen washing blood off his shirt. Conley then admitted writing two notes that had been found by Mary Phagan's body. The police assumed that, as author of these notes, Conley was the murderer; but Conley claimed, after apparent coaching from Dorsey, that Leo Frank had confessed to murdering Mary in the lathe room and then paid Conley to pen the notes and help him move Mary's body to the basement.
Even after Frank's housekeeper placed him at home, having lunch at the time of the murder and despite gross inconsistencies in Conley's story, both the grand and trial jury chose to believe Conley. This was perhaps the first instance of a Southern black man's testimony being used to convict a white man. In August of 1913, the jury found Frank guilty in less than four hours. Crowds outside the courthouse shouted, "Hang the Jew."
Historian Leonard Dinnerstein reports that one juror had been overheard to say before his selection for the jury, "I am glad they indicted the God damn Jew. They ought to take him out and lynch him. And if I get on that jury, I'll hang that Jew for sure."
Facing intimidation and mob rule, the trial judge sentenced Frank to death. He barred Frank from the courtroom on the grounds that, had he been acquitted, Frank might have been lynched by the crowd outside.
Frank Is Saved, Briefly
Despite these breaches of due process, Georgia's higher courts rejected Frank's appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court voted, 7-2, against reopening the case, with justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes dissenting. Frank's survival depended on Georgia governor Frank Slaton. After a 12-day review of the evidence and letters recommending commutation from the trial judge (who must have had second thoughts) and from a private investigator who had worked for Hugh Dorsey, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment.
That night, state police kept a protesting crowd of 5,000 from the governor's mansion. Wary Jewish families fled Atlanta. Slaton held firm. "Two thousand years ago," he wrote a few days later, "another Governor washed his hands and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor's name has been accursed. If today another Jew [Leo Frank] were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice."
On August 17, 1915, a group of 25 men--described by peers as "sober, intelligent, of established good name and character"--stormed the prison hospital where Leo Frank was recovering from having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. They kidnapped Frank, drove him more than 100 miles to Mary Phagan's home town of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree.
Frank conducted himself with dignity, calmly proclaiming his innocence. Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank's swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants. When his term expired a year later, Slaton did not run for reelection and Dorsey easily won election to the governor's office.
In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally granted Leo Frank a posthumous pardon, not because they thought him innocent, but because his lynching deprived him of his right to further appeal. Mary Phagan's descendants and their supporters still insist on his guilt.
Video provided by Jewish Television Network
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid29474138001?bctid=1351306721
____________________________________________________________________________
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Jewish_World_Today/Jews_Around_the_Globe/Anti-Semitism_Today.shtml
Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century
Taboo no longer?
By Ira Rifkin
Ira Rifkin is a national correspondent for Religion News Service based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization: Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval.
It is an irony of Jewish life that it took the Holocaust to give anti-Semitism a bad name. So widespread was international revulsion over the annihilation of six million Jews that following World War II anti-Semitism, even of the polite variety, became the hatred one dared not publicly express. But only for a time.
At the dawn of the 21st century, virulent, open anti-Semitism has surfaced yet again, and in a big way. One need only read a Jewish newspaper or website--replete as they are with accounts of verbal anti-Semitism by high officials and intellectuals, and anti-Semitic physical attacks by common street thugs--to understand the depth of concern this has stirred among Jews.
The United States
The new anti-Semitism is most apparent in Western Europe and the Muslim world. But even in the United States, long viewed as the world's safest nation for Jews, anti-Semitism's resurgence may be seen in the proliferation of websites maintained by right-wing extremists and anti-Israel activists, and in the rhetoric of left-wing anti-globalization demonstrators on the streets of New York and Washington, many of whom equate Israel with fascism.
Modern Israel, the state its founders believed would provide safe sanctuary for Jews, is the prime target of contemporary anti-Semitism. It is recognizable in anti-Israel criticism that blurs the line between legitimate opposition to Israeli government policies and a barely concealed hatred that blames Israel's very existence--and by extension Jews everywhere, all of whom are presumed to support Israel's every decision--for much of the world's troubles.
The new anti-Semitism is also discernible in the claims that "neocons"--now a trendy pejorative for some well-connected, political conservatives (some of them Jews) who are aligned with Republican policies--are manipulating U.S. foreign policy for Israel's benefit. It amounts to a new twist on the age-old anti-Semitic canard that what Jews seek above all else is global hegemony.
How bad is the situation? "The combination of Jew hatred and the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by hostile governments makes the threat of this anti-Semitism the greatest since the Holocaust," Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman warned in a December 2003 newspaper column.
The Muslim World
Foxman's mention of "hostile governments" was a reference to Middle East Muslim nations that view Israel as a colonialist cancer injected into their midst without any moral or historical justification. Tensions have existed between Jews and Muslims since the seventh-century Jews of Mecca rejected the religious and political leadership of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Still, the violent and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ratcheted up Muslim animosity toward Jews--and the Jewish state--to unprecedented global levels. Making it worse are radical Islamists who, to advance their own cause, cast Jews, along with "crusader" Christians, as the enemies of all Muslims, Palestinian or otherwise.
Muslim anti-Semitism has ranged of late from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad's enthusiastically received claim at the 2003 Islamic Summit Conference that "Jews rule this world by proxy," to the Ramadan holy month broadcasts of multi-part dramatic TV series purporting to document Jewish plans to subjugate the world. Such series, widely shown across the Muslim Middle East, rely heavily on the infamous 19th century anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as "proof" of their claims.
Then there's the constant demonizing in Muslim newspapers and magazines of Jews as "pigs and sons of monkeys," and the fiery sermons of Muslim clerics who equate Jews with Nazis and maintain that virtually all Israeli measures to contain Palestinian terrorism amount to nothing less than a new "Holocaust." Yet another example from July 2003 is the charge in a Saudi Arabian newspaper that Jews of Iraqi ancestry will seek to return to their former homeland now that Saddam Hussein has been ousted "for the realization of expansionist Zionist goals."
Given the heightened state of political tensions that have inflamed the Middle East for nearly a century, Muslim anti-Semitism, it may be argued, can be understood as an inevitable, if tragic, group response to a seemingly unsolvable conflict. Surely there are also Jews who, as a result of the conflict, blindly view all Muslims as supportive of hateful terrorism without ever having spoken person-to-person to a single Muslim.
Europe
Less easily understood, however, is the resurgence of Western European anti-Semitism. There, French Jews have been attacked and Jewish schools burned by arsonists. Israeli academics--whose area of research has nothing to do with politics or Israeli policy--have been uninvited from European academic conferences that likewise aren't political in nature or subject matter. In Turkey, suicide bombers attacked two synagogues during Shabbat prayers in late 2003.
Writing in The Jerusalem Report, commentator Stuart Schoffman postulates that Western European anti-Semitism is both an attempt to shake off Holocaust guilt by arguing that Jews no longer warrant sympathy due to Israel's alleged wrongs, and "a twisted expression of atonement--in France and Belgium in particular, but elsewhere too--for (Europe's) own sordid colonial past."
Also a factor is Western Europe's burgeoning Muslim population. It is simply politically expedient--not to mention a hoped-for hedge against revengeful terrorist rage--for Western European nations with growing Muslim under-classes and shrinking, if not miniscule, Jewish communities, to excuse or even agree with Muslim anti-Semitism rather than confront it.
A European Union report on growing anti-Semitism on the continent unwittingly highlighted this last factor. The study concluded that Muslim youths were in large part responsible for the surge of anti-Semitic incidents across Europe. The EU withheld from publicizing the study--prompting Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and Cobi Benetoff, president of the European Jewish Congress, to jointly accuse EU leaders of exhibiting anti-Semitism. (EU commissioners said they decided to withhold the study because its methodology was flawed.)
A major development in today's anti-Semitism in Europe is its prevalence in the non-communist left. Europe's right-wingers have long used anti-Semitism as a political rallying cry. European communists, taking their cue from the former Soviet Union, also railed against Jews and Judaism as counter-revolutionary elements.
But the current surge in anti-Semitism has seen major artists, intellectuals, and politicians of the left also engaged. Among them have been Portuguese novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, who compared Israel to Nazi Germany; Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who called Jews the root of all the world's evil; and Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to Britain, who was overheard in an unguarded moment at a dinner party calling Israel "a shitty little country" that was bringing the world to the brink of World War III.
Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic
To be fair, legitimate criticism of Israel's actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians cannot all be labeled anti-Semitism, as some would have it. Complicating this is the fact that the Magen David [Star of David] is a symbol for both Judaism and Israel, which gives license to political cartoonists, for example, to depict the Star of David in work claiming to be critical only of Israel's actions and not of Jews more broadly. Israel's claim to be a homeland for global Jewry provides its enemies with additional reason--disingenuous as it may be--to claim that virtually all Jews give aid and comfort to the Jewish state.
Anti-Semitism, then, may be said at times to be in the eye of the beholder. Yet when Israel alone is singled out from among the family of nations as an illegitimate state, when Jewish nationhood is belittled as a modern political claim despite its 3,000-year-long history, and when United Nations officials allow an international conference on racism to focus almost entirely on the Jewish state, as happened in Durban, South Africa, just weeks before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is no surprise that Jews believe they are facing unabashed anti-Semitism rather than legitimate political disagreement.
"Let's be realistic," David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, wrote in mid-2003. "Given its longevity, anti-Semitism in one form or another is likely to outlive us all. That seems like a safe, if unfortunate, bet. No Jonas Salk has yet come along with an immunization protocol to eradicate forever the anti-Semitic virus, nor is any major breakthrough likely in the foreseeable future."
THE SAVVY JEWISH COMMUNITY OF TODAY IS A NECESSITY FOR COUNTERING THE ANCENT HATREDS OF OLD IN NEW GUISES
At the same time, Harris continued, "the Jewish community looks radically different than it did, say, 60 or 70 years ago" when anti-Semitism in Europe erupted into the Holocaust.
"Today, there is an Israel; then, there was not. Today, there are sophisticated, savvy, and well-connected Jewish institutions; then, Jewish institutions were much less confident and sure-footed. Collectively, we have the capacity to track trends in anti-Semitism, exchange information on a timely basis with other interested parties, reach centers of power, build alliances within and across borders, and consider the best mix of diplomatic, political, legal, and other strategies for countering troubling developments."
For Harris, at least, the ability of Jews to stand up to anti-Semitism is greater today then it ever has been. "We may not succeed in each and every case," he said, "but we've come a very long way thanks to a steely determination, in Israel and the Diaspora, to fight vigorously against anti-Semitism, while simultaneously helping to build a world in which anti-Semitism-and everything it stands for-is in irreversible decline."
There are, however, many Jews less confident about the future than is Harris. It remains to be seen whether Harris is correct about Jews' ability to withstand the latest tide of anti-Semitism--and whether those many non-Jews who today speak up in opposition to anti-Semitism will be there should their support become even more crucial.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
The Mortara Affair
The Damascus Blood Libel & the Mortara Affair
When anti-Semitism struck in Damascus and Italy the Jewish community was galvanized and unified.
By Norman H. Finkelstein Email this page Print this page
Reprinted with permission from The JPS Guide to American Jewish History (Jewish Publication Society).
The early 19th-century Jews of the United States were less than cohesive in presenting a uniform national image. Divided by geographic, linguistic, and cultural origins, their lives revolved around family and local community. It took events thousands of miles away to bring the nascent national Jewish community to life.
The Damascus Blood Libel
The mysterious disappearance of a Catholic monk in Syria in 1840 reawakened the medieval anti-Jewish blood libel. A number of Jews were arrested and tortured. People around the world were shocked. In America, Jewish communities organized public meetings and sent petitions of protest to President Van Buren, who issued an official denunciation of the affair. This marked the first time that the Jews of the United States interested themselves and enlisted the interest of the government in the cause of suffering Jews in another part of the world.
When an American Jewish merchant was expelled from Switzerland in 1857, Isaac Leeser and Isaac M. Wise joined forces. Using their respective newspapers, they organized Jewish delegations from around the country to go to Washington and lobby government officials. American Jews discovered that their voices did matter and that a united front gained them access to the national centers of political power.
Edgardo Mortara as an adult and Augustine Order priest (right) and his mother
The Mortara Affair
The next year, another anti-Jewish act, this time in Italy, galvanized the world Jewish community. A young child, Edgar Mortara, secretly baptized by his devout Catholic nurse as an infant, was kidnapped by Vatican agents. His involuntary baptism was enough to make the little boy a Catholic in the eyes of the Church. Vatican officials removed the boy from his home to be raised as a Catholic.
The feelings of Edgar's Jewish parents can scarcely be imagined. Jews and non-Jews everywhere were outraged, but pleas from around the world fell on deaf ears in the Vatican. Edgar was raised as a Catholic and grew up to become a priest.
A positive effect of the Mortara Affair was that it institutionalized American Jewish political action for the first time by leading to the creation of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in 1859, for securing and maintaining civil and religious rights at home and abroad.
The board, an early attempt to organize the disparate American Jewish community, did not have universal support from all leaders of the time. Rabbis Wise and Einhorn were opposed to its establishment, as were the venerable congregations of Shearith Israel and Emanu-El in New York and Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. They objected to the creation of a not religiously affiliated organization to represent the entire Jewish community.
Although the board merged in 1878 with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, at the time of its creation it was the first centralized organization to speak for American Jews. Together with such fraternal organizations as B'nai B'rith, it marked the emergence of a secular leadership in the Jewish community, which had formerly been dominated by the synagogue.
Soon other organizations, social and philanthropic, would arise to represent the diverse needs of a growing Jewish population. Like their Christian neighbors, most Jews continued to identify with their religion. But with traditional dietary and dress customs falling by the wayside, they adapted their lives to fit an American lifestyle
Norman H. Finkelstein is a writer, editor and teacher. A former school librarian in the Brookline, Massachusetts Public Schools, he has been teaching children's literature and history courses at Hebrew College for over twenty-five years. He is the series editor for the JPS Guides series published by the Jewish Publication Society.
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Blood Libels
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Passover/History/Medieval/Blood_Libels.shtml
The accusation that blood was used to make wine or matzah for Passover
By Larry Domnitch Email this page Print this page
Reprinted with permission of the publisher from The Jewish Holidays: A Journey Through History (Jason Aronson, Inc).
When Passover night arrives, the cups of wine are filled and the prayers and songs of the holiday are joyfully chanted. In today's times, Passover has often become synonymous with vacation, as newspapers are filled with advertisements for Passover getaways to places ranging from the Canadian Rockies to Miami Beach to the French Riviera.
But that's not how Passover was celebrated for the Jews of medieval Europe. For them, wine--traditionally a symbol of gladness and holiday celebration--also signaled a time for contemplation on Passover. When Passover arrived, Jews celebrated with extreme caution and fear, unsure of the violence that could be unleashed against them.
That time of the year coincides with the Easter season, a time when Christians commemorate the Crucifixion. Too often, Jews, who were blamed for the Crucifixion and resented for their rejection of Christianity, became targets of hatred and superstitions. Often it was their use of wine on Passover that prompted those attacks.
On Passover, the bizarre blood libel accusations were often leveled against the Jews. These accusations usually led to violent attacks against Jewish communities. There were hundreds of blood libels throughout history, resulting in the deaths of thousands. The blood libel theme rarely deviated. A child--almost always a young boy--was lost. Allegations then arose that the Jews murdered him and used his blood for ritual purposes. Usually those leveling the accusations had murdered the child themselves in order to accuse the Jews. Sometimes the child was a victim of an accident or later found unharmed. The cruelest methods of torture were often used to force confessions and the fabricated charges would serve as a pretext to slander and attack Jewish communities.
By the 14th century, ritual murder charges became common at Passover time. The fact that human sacrifice and the use of even animal blood for any purpose are strictly forbidden according to Jewish law did not matter to those perpetrators and believers of lies. Reason is abandoned when hatred and ignorance rule. Repudiations of blood libels by many popes throughout the ages did little or nothing to stop them.
The First Accusation
The first ritual murder accusation in history against the Jews goes back to Egypt at about 40 BCE when a propagandist named Apion, intent upon inciting the masses against the Jews of Alexandria, slandered them with a blood libel accusation. Not until over one thousand years later did the accusation resurface. On Passover 1144, in Norwich, England, a young man named William, a tanner's apprentice, disappeared during the week of Easter, which coincided with Passover that year. Charges immediately arose that the Jews killed him as part of a ritual murder. According to the accusation, the Jews "bought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him and on Long Friday hanged him on a rod. Since no body was found, the Sheriff of Norwich ignored the charges and granted the Jews protection. But the story was not forgotten, and the missing boy, William, became a martyr amongst the town's people. A short time later, the Jews of Norwich were attacked by mobs seeking vengeance and were forced to flee.
Eleven years later, the blood libel resurfaced bringing horrific consequences to Jews attending a wedding in Lincoln, England. A Christian boy named Hugh was found in a cesspool where he apparently had fallen. After subsequent forced, tortured confessions, 19 Jews were hanged. Soon, the anti-Semites of England accused all of England's Jews of participating in ritual murder. The many accusations that followed were often accompanied by violent attacks against Jewish communities.
In 1171, the blood libel reached France. In the city of Blois, rumors spread that Jews committed murder in order to extract blood for Passover matzot. On May 26, 1171, two months after Passover--without the recovery of a corpse--the 33 members of the Blois Jewish community, which included seventeen women, were burned at the stake after they refused the chance to save themselves by accepting Christianity. French Jewry were shocked and horrified by the event. The rabbinical scholar Rabbeinu Jacob Tam proclaimed the day of the massacre, the 20th day of Sivan, a fast day to commemorate the tragedy.
Tragically, many more such horrors would follow. Ten years later, the accusation reached Spain at Saragossa. (Historically, blood libels were not as pervasive in Spain.) The merchants of hate and perpetrators of lies found a new frontier for their poison and more countries lay in their path.
In the 17th century, catastrophe struck Polish Jewry as Cossack troops attacked and massacred entire Jewish communities during the Chmielnicki Revolt. Rabbi David Halevy Siegel, who lived during that era and authored a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law) entitled the Turei Zahav, issued a ruling intended to protect Jews from the blood libel. He ruled that the traditional red wine used at the Seders be substituted with white wine in lands of persecution in order not to arouse suspicion. "In lands where false accusations are made, we refrain from using red wine. On Passover night, white wine was consumed thereafter. In his own life, Rabbi Siegel managed to flee from the Chmielnicki massacres, but he was not spared great personal suffering when two of his sons were murdered in a pogrom in Lvov, Poland, in 1654.
Slow Decline
Over the next three hundred years, as the modern era approached, there was a slow decline in blood libels, but they did continue. In 1840, the Damascus blood libel drew protests from Jews worldwide and signified the entry of blood libels into the Middle East. The infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903 began on the last day of Passover as the result of a blood libel.
Although blood libels became less frequent over time, their rhetoric and the power of their accusations helped to set the stage for new conspiracy theories. With the approach of the era of modernization and the Industrial Revolution, accusations arose against the Jews of conspiracy for world domination. Canards of Jewish control and aspirations for global domination became the new theme for the hate propagandists.
As Jews celebrated Passover in bygone eras, they were aware of the risks involved. At the Passover seder, they drank the four cups of wine that symbolized freedom, but not in the traditional color. When they gazed at the white wine that adorned their holiday tables, they were reminded of their own sufferings and of their precarious existence. They lived in hostile environments and they suffered, yet they could celebrate the freedom experienced by their ancestors as they exited Egypt and they could nonetheless sit and recline in the manner of nobility and drink white wine celebrating their legacy as Jews. Today, we who drink red wine at our seders can think about our ancestors of Europe and their trials and triumphs.
Jew vs. Gentile in the Eyes of the Torah, Part I
http://sn111w.snt111.mail.live.com/default.aspx#!/mail/InboxLight.aspx?n=1283502963!n=1376256801&fid=1&mid=db7ec900-9adb-11e1-a50f-00215ad801ce&fv=1
Jew vs. Gentile in the Eyes of the Torah, Part I
Chapter 1, Mishna 18(a)
"Rabbi Shimon ben (son of) Gamliel said: On three things does the world endure: justice, truth and peace, as the verse states, 'Truth and [judgments of] peace judge in your gates'" (Zechariah 8:16).
This mishna is similar to an earlier mishna in this chapter. Mishna 2 (www.torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos/chapter1-2.html) stated as follows: "The world is based upon three things: on Torah, on service [of G-d], and on acts of kindness." Here we are presented with a perfectly respectable but entirely different list. Further, the earlier mishna enumerated three things which the world is "based upon" ("omaid" ("stands on") in Hebrew), whereas here the mishna lists that which the world "endures" upon ("kayam" = "lasts" or "is sustained"). What is the difference?
The difference is evidently based on the discrepancy in language between the two mishnas. Above the focus was on what the world is based upon; i.e., upon what basis or for what reason was the world created. And the mishna proceeded to list the three pillars which form the purpose of creation. They are: (a) that man serve G-d, (b) that we act towards one another with kindness and brotherhood, building perfect and Divine societies, and (c) that we study Torah and become spiritual people capable of forming a relationship with G-d. This is of course only the most hopeless of summaries -- of our discussion there which in itself attempted to explain far too much in far too little space. Nevertheless, for today's purposes, we note what Mishna 2 *was* about -- and what ours is *not* about: G-d's purpose in creating the world.
Here R. Shimon focuses on how the world can "endure" -- what is required in order that the world continue to operate smoothly and not disintegrate into anarchy. And this refers to the much more mundane. Justice, truth and peace, although seemingly lofty goals on their own -- and ones which man usually falls far short of -- do not constitute the purpose of creation. They imply that societies function smoothly: that both individuals and nations interact peacefully and honestly, and that governments uphold justice, both respecting and protecting the rights of their citizens. These are not the true purposes of creation. G-d did not create the world only in order that wars *not* be fought or that individual liberties *not* be suppressed -- nor did He create it so that people would be able to walk down the street without fear of getting mugged. But these are the needed prerequisites so that true religion and devotion to G-d can take hold. Once truth, peace and justice prevail, man, rather than struggling for his basic survival, will be able to turn his attention to religion and spiritual growth.
THE NOAHIDE LAWS UNIVERSAL ON JEW AND GENTILE ALIKE
It's significant to note that the obligation to establish healthy and functioning societies is universal -- one which G-d placed upon all of mankind and not only upon Israel. There are seven universal laws -- known as the Seven Noahide Laws -- whose performance G-d obligated upon all of mankind, both Jew and Gentile. (The Talmud (Sanhedrin 57-8) derives these laws from verses in the stories of Genesis and Noah, before the advent of Abraham and Israel.) These laws are (six negatives and one positive): (1) idolatry, (2) cursing G-d, (3) murder, (4) adultery / incest, (5) robbery, (6) eating a limb torn from a live animal, and (7) organizing judicial systems.
As we will see G-d willing next week, the purpose of these laws is not so that man become overly spiritual or ascetic. G-d does not ask all of mankind to refrain from forbidden foods, to rest on the Sabbath, or to restrict his behavior in any really infringing way. But G-d does ask man to create societies which function smoothly and which provide man with at least the most basic respect for moral values. No society can survive while condoning murder and robbery -- with no degree of respect for human life and property. Likewise, adultery -- the destruction of the family unit -- destroys the most basic building block of human society. Finally, functional justice systems are required to uphold all the laws and make them binding. (Number 6 -- eating limb torn from a live animal -- is a related but separate discussion, which we will touch on G-d willing in 4:1 (www.torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos/chapter4-1a.h tml).)
Most important, however, is the belief in G-d. This is the most crucial basis for any law to be meaningful. If we refrain from murder only because *we* think it's the wrong thing to do, laws become worthless -- and empty excuses for true moral conviction. Such laws do not create a sense of respect for truth and absolute values -- only for human expediency. I can't kill you because tomorrow your brother will come and kill me. But if we all agree that blacks or Jews can be killed -- or that an unborn child isn't really living anyway, etc. etc. ad nauseam -- nothing is sacred. Without belief in G-d and the adherence to an absolute, G-d-given code of values, no law, no matter how reasonable and expedient, will be sacrosanct and above human corruption.
We are taught further that if a Gentile observes the Seven Laws -- and he does so because G-d commanded him, not because they simply conform to his own perception of morality -- he is promised a share in the World to Come (Maimonides, Mishne Torah, Hil' Melachim 8:11). Judaism distinguishes itself from all other religions (to my knowledge) in that it does not claim that all non-believers are condemned to eternal damnation if they don't do things our way. Israel was given a special mission in this world -- to serve as an example of spirituality for all mankind to see. But the rest of the world has hardly been "forgotten" by G-d. G-d still places commandments on all mankind, accepts their prayers, and rewards and punishes them according to their deeds. G-d is there and patiently awaiting all who seek Him, both Jew and Gentile.
Thus far we have learned the three pillars upon which the world endures. And we have learned that G-d asks all mankind -- not only Israel -- to uphold these pillars. And this provides us with an interesting insight into G-d's design for mankind. G-d does not ask all mankind to become ascetics or religious fanatics. Within a certain framework, they can live lives of their own choosing. But He does ask that Gentiles create basically moral societies.
And within these societies Israel will be able to flourish.
G-d has entrusted the world not to Israel but to all mankind. And He asks man, both Jew and Gentile, to make it a place sufficiently worthy that religion and spirituality may take hold. G-d does not force intense religious practice or doctrine upon all of mankind, but He does ask that man fashion a world which is basically receptive to -- and can aspire to -- something greater. It is almost as if G-d says to man as follows: "Create civilizations which might be secular (so long as not idolatrous), but which uphold certain basic moral principles. Promote justice, brotherhood, and a basic appreciation for humanity and ethical behavior. And within, religion will be able to take hold and flourish. Israel will be able to serve Me freely -- and the world may just be receptive to its message."
Jew vs. Gentile in the Eyes of the Torah, Part I
Chapter 1, Mishna 18(a)
"Rabbi Shimon ben (son of) Gamliel said: On three things does the world endure: justice, truth and peace, as the verse states, 'Truth and [judgments of] peace judge in your gates'" (Zechariah 8:16).
This mishna is similar to an earlier mishna in this chapter. Mishna 2 (www.torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos/chapter1-2.html) stated as follows: "The world is based upon three things: on Torah, on service [of G-d], and on acts of kindness." Here we are presented with a perfectly respectable but entirely different list. Further, the earlier mishna enumerated three things which the world is "based upon" ("omaid" ("stands on") in Hebrew), whereas here the mishna lists that which the world "endures" upon ("kayam" = "lasts" or "is sustained"). What is the difference?
The difference is evidently based on the discrepancy in language between the two mishnas. Above the focus was on what the world is based upon; i.e., upon what basis or for what reason was the world created. And the mishna proceeded to list the three pillars which form the purpose of creation. They are: (a) that man serve G-d, (b) that we act towards one another with kindness and brotherhood, building perfect and Divine societies, and (c) that we study Torah and become spiritual people capable of forming a relationship with G-d. This is of course only the most hopeless of summaries -- of our discussion there which in itself attempted to explain far too much in far too little space. Nevertheless, for today's purposes, we note what Mishna 2 *was* about -- and what ours is *not* about: G-d's purpose in creating the world.
Here R. Shimon focuses on how the world can "endure" -- what is required in order that the world continue to operate smoothly and not disintegrate into anarchy. And this refers to the much more mundane. Justice, truth and peace, although seemingly lofty goals on their own -- and ones which man usually falls far short of -- do not constitute the purpose of creation. They imply that societies function smoothly: that both individuals and nations interact peacefully and honestly, and that governments uphold justice, both respecting and protecting the rights of their citizens. These are not the true purposes of creation. G-d did not create the world only in order that wars *not* be fought or that individual liberties *not* be suppressed -- nor did He create it so that people would be able to walk down the street without fear of getting mugged. But these are the needed prerequisites so that true religion and devotion to G-d can take hold. Once truth, peace and justice prevail, man, rather than struggling for his basic survival, will be able to turn his attention to religion and spiritual growth.
THE NOAHIDE LAWS UNIVERSAL ON JEW AND GENTILE ALIKE
It's significant to note that the obligation to establish healthy and functioning societies is universal -- one which G-d placed upon all of mankind and not only upon Israel. There are seven universal laws -- known as the Seven Noahide Laws -- whose performance G-d obligated upon all of mankind, both Jew and Gentile. (The Talmud (Sanhedrin 57-8) derives these laws from verses in the stories of Genesis and Noah, before the advent of Abraham and Israel.) These laws are (six negatives and one positive): (1) idolatry, (2) cursing G-d, (3) murder, (4) adultery / incest, (5) robbery, (6) eating a limb torn from a live animal, and (7) organizing judicial systems.
As we will see G-d willing next week, the purpose of these laws is not so that man become overly spiritual or ascetic. G-d does not ask all of mankind to refrain from forbidden foods, to rest on the Sabbath, or to restrict his behavior in any really infringing way. But G-d does ask man to create societies which function smoothly and which provide man with at least the most basic respect for moral values. No society can survive while condoning murder and robbery -- with no degree of respect for human life and property. Likewise, adultery -- the destruction of the family unit -- destroys the most basic building block of human society. Finally, functional justice systems are required to uphold all the laws and make them binding. (Number 6 -- eating limb torn from a live animal -- is a related but separate discussion, which we will touch on G-d willing in 4:1 (www.torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos/chapter4-1a.h tml).)
Most important, however, is the belief in G-d. This is the most crucial basis for any law to be meaningful. If we refrain from murder only because *we* think it's the wrong thing to do, laws become worthless -- and empty excuses for true moral conviction. Such laws do not create a sense of respect for truth and absolute values -- only for human expediency. I can't kill you because tomorrow your brother will come and kill me. But if we all agree that blacks or Jews can be killed -- or that an unborn child isn't really living anyway, etc. etc. ad nauseam -- nothing is sacred. Without belief in G-d and the adherence to an absolute, G-d-given code of values, no law, no matter how reasonable and expedient, will be sacrosanct and above human corruption.
We are taught further that if a Gentile observes the Seven Laws -- and he does so because G-d commanded him, not because they simply conform to his own perception of morality -- he is promised a share in the World to Come (Maimonides, Mishne Torah, Hil' Melachim 8:11). Judaism distinguishes itself from all other religions (to my knowledge) in that it does not claim that all non-believers are condemned to eternal damnation if they don't do things our way. Israel was given a special mission in this world -- to serve as an example of spirituality for all mankind to see. But the rest of the world has hardly been "forgotten" by G-d. G-d still places commandments on all mankind, accepts their prayers, and rewards and punishes them according to their deeds. G-d is there and patiently awaiting all who seek Him, both Jew and Gentile.
Thus far we have learned the three pillars upon which the world endures. And we have learned that G-d asks all mankind -- not only Israel -- to uphold these pillars. And this provides us with an interesting insight into G-d's design for mankind. G-d does not ask all mankind to become ascetics or religious fanatics. Within a certain framework, they can live lives of their own choosing. But He does ask that Gentiles create basically moral societies.
And within these societies Israel will be able to flourish.
G-d has entrusted the world not to Israel but to all mankind. And He asks man, both Jew and Gentile, to make it a place sufficiently worthy that religion and spirituality may take hold. G-d does not force intense religious practice or doctrine upon all of mankind, but He does ask that man fashion a world which is basically receptive to -- and can aspire to -- something greater. It is almost as if G-d says to man as follows: "Create civilizations which might be secular (so long as not idolatrous), but which uphold certain basic moral principles. Promote justice, brotherhood, and a basic appreciation for humanity and ethical behavior. And within, religion will be able to take hold and flourish. Israel will be able to serve Me freely -- and the world may just be receptive to its message."
PURPOSE OF G-DLY CONTRACTIONS TO OUR WORLD
Today's Tanya Lesson
Likutei Amarim, beginning of Chapter 49
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The Alter Rebbe explained in the previous chapter that since the light and life drawn down from G‑d is infinite — Ein Sof, as its name indicates — therefore in order for this finite world to be created, the Divine light had to undergo a multitude of contractions (tzimtzumim). This was the only way that finite creation could proceed from the infinite light of Ein Sof; were it to have been drawn down in an orderly progression, finitude would have never resulted.
As will be explained later in this chapter, all these contractions were a result of G‑d’s love of the Jewish people and His desire that they have the opportunity to fulfill Torah and the mitzvot.
The Alter Rebbe will now describe these contractions in a general manner, and will conclude that just as G‑d “overcame all obstacles” because of His love for the Jews and created finite worlds and creatures, so, too, “as water mirrors the reflection of a face,” should every Jew overcome all obstacles and come to experience a love of G‑d. Moreover, just as G‑d brought forth His light into this world in a manner that transcended orderly and limited progression, so, too, should every Jew seek to serve G‑d not only in an orderly and limited fashion, but without limit, renouncing everything for the sake of his love of Him. Even limitations foisted upon him by the world’s very nature should not act as an impediment to his service of G‑d.
והנה אף כי פרטי בחינות ההסתר והעלם אור אין סוף ברוך הוא בהשתלשלות העולמות, עד שנברא עולם הזה הגשמי, עצמו מספר ומינים ממינים שונים
Even though the particular aspects of the nature of the obscuring and concealment of the [infinite] light of the blessed Ein Sof in the descent of the worlds, descending as they do ever lower until this material world was created, are too numerous to count and are of many diverse kinds,
כידוע לטועמים מעץ החיים
as is known to those who have tasted of the “Tree of Life,” the Kabbalah,
אך דרך כלל הם שלשה מיני צמצומים עצומים כלליים, לשלשה מיני עולמות כלליים, ובכל כלל יש רבוא רבבות פרטים, והם שלשה עולמות: בריאה, יצירה, עשיה, כי עולם האצילות הוא אלקות ממש
yet in general there are three levels of powerful and comprehensive “contractions” giving rise to three comprehensive Worlds, each category consisting of myriads upon myriads of particulars. These are the Worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah — for the World of Atzilut is G‑dliness itself.
ATZILUT
Since Atzilut is G‑dliness itself it is not considered to be created ex nihilo, but rather is called Atzilut, which means an emanation from and an extension of G‑dliness — an illumination which comes from G‑d liness itself.
וכדי לברוא עולם הבריאה, שהן נשמות ומלאכים עליונים, אשר עבודתם לה׳ בבחינת חב״ד המתלבשים בהם
BERIAH
In order to create the World of Beriah, which consists of the higher souls and angels whose service to G‑d is in the sphere of the intellectual faculties of ChaBaD which are clothed in them — i.e., G‑dliness is revealed to them in an intellectual manner, through the three intellectual faculties of Chochmah, Binah and Daat,
והם משיגים ומקבלים מהם
and they i.e., the souls and angels apprehend them and receive [influence] from them — from ChaBaD which illumines them,
In order to create a world whose creations are not wholly nullified to G‑d — as is the case in Atzilut — but are only capable of knowledge and comprehension (and it will be noted that comprehension entails an awareness of one’s own being, in that comprehension presupposes an entity who is comprehending),
היה תחלה צמצום עצום כנ״ל
there necessarily preceded a powerful “contraction”, as mentioned above.
A mighty “contraction” was necessary in order to ensure that the light of G‑dliness manifest in Atzilut should be hidden, and that only a “contracted” form of light should illuminate and create creatures of the World of Beriah, which are on a level of creation ex nihilo.
וכן מבריאה ליצירה
So, too, from Beriah to Yetzirah,
In order for the World of Yetzirah — a World far lower than Beriah — to be created, there again had to be a powerful contraction.
כי אור מעט מזער המתלבש בעולם הבריאה, עדיין הוא בבחינת אין סוף לגבי עולם היצירה
for the minute portion of light (“minute”, that is, in relation to the light found in Atzilut) which clothes itself in the World of Beriah is still in a category of infinity in relation to the World of Yetzirah, so that the light of Beriah had to undergo a powerful “contraction” before it was able to descend into Yetzirah,
ואי אפשר להתלבש בו אלא על ידי צמצום והעלם, וכן מיצירה לעשיה
and it is unable to clothe itself in the latter except through contraction and obscuration. So, too, from Yetzirah to Asiyah.
There, too, the light of the World of Yetzirah had to be considerably limited to enable it to descend into the World of Asiyah.
וכמו שכתוב במקום אחר ביאור שלשה צמצומים אלו באריכות, לקרב אל שכלינו הדל
(1An elaborate explanation of these three “contractions” is given elsewhere, in order to make them more accessible to our poor intellect.)
ותכלית כל הצמצומים הוא כדי לברוא גוף האדם החומרי, ולאכפייא לסטרא אחרא, ולהיות יתרון האור מן החושך
PURPOSE OF ALL THE CONTRACTIONS
The purpose of all the “contractions” is the creation of the material human body and the subjugation by man of the sitra achra, to bring about the preeminence of light supplanting darkness — by having light replace darkness, and even more so when the darkness itself is transformed into light, at which time the preeminence of light is felt to an even greater degree. This is accomplished:
בהעלות האדם את נפשו האלקית והחיונית ולבושיהן, וכל כחות הגוף כולן, לה׳ לבדו, כנ״ל באריכות
when a person elevates his divine soul and his vivifying soul (a soul which receives its nourishment from kelipot, but through man’s service in Torah and mitzvot is elevated and incorporated into holiness, thereby elevating the souls) together with their garments of thought, speech and action, and all the powers of the body, to G‑d alone, as has been discussed earlier at length,
כי זה תכלית השתלשלות העולמות
PROGRESSIVE DESCENT OF THE WORLDS
for this is the purpose of the progressive descent of the Worlds.
The ultimate purpose of all the descents from level to level and World to World is this physical world. It is here that a Jew is able, through his divine service, to effect the subjugation of evil and the preeminence of light supplanting darkness.
The Alter Rebbe now goes on to say that just as G‑d’s love for the Jews “overcame all obstacles” that (as it were) stood in the way of creating this physical world, contracting His infinite light so that infinite beings could be created, so, too, should every Jew respond in kind by overcoming all obstacles that hinder him from serving G‑d. Furthermore, his level of service too should not be finite but infinite.
והנה כמים הפנים לפנים
And “as water mirrors the reflection of a face”:
Just as water reflects an exact replica of one’s face, so, too, with regard to the “heart of man to his fellow man,” the love of one person to another results in the other person’s loving him as well:
כמו שהקב״ה כביכול הניח וסילק לצדדין דרך משל את אורו הגדול הבלתי תכלית וגנזו והסתירו בג׳ מיני צמצומים שונים, והכל בשביל אהבת האדם התחתון, להעלותו לה׳
As G‑d has (as it were) laid down and set aside, figuratively speaking, His great infinite light, and has stored it away and concealed it by means of three different kinds of “contractions” — and all this because of His love for lowly man, in order to raise him up to G‑d,
This means to say that G‑d created a world in which man may serve Him, and by doing so man is uplifted to G‑d. But how is it possible for love to bring about “contraction”, when love signifies kindness and expansiveness, while contraction and concealment characterize severity? The Alter Rebbe answers this implied question by pointing out that we find that love, too, can bring about contraction, as in the Gemara now quoted:
כי אהבה דוחקת את הבשר
RENUNCIATION
for2 “love impels the flesh,” so that the flesh will not impede it. Thus, because of G‑d’s love for His people, He (figuratively speaking) set aside His great light and concealed it through many contractions, and so on. This being so:
2. Bava Metzia 84a.
על אחת כמה וכמה, בכפלי כפליים לאין קץ, כי ראוי לאדם גם כן להניח ולעזוב כל אשר לו מנפש ועד בשר, ולהפקיר הכל
how much more, and an infinite number of times more, is it fitting that a man also should relinquish and set aside all he possesses, both spiritually and physically, and renounce everything,
בשביל לדבקה בו יתברך בדביקה חשיקה וחפיצה, ולא יהיה שום מונע מבית ומחוץ, לא גוף ולא נפש ולא ממון ולא אשה ובנים
in order to cleave to Him, with attachment, desire and longing, without any hindrance, within or without, neither of body nor soul — hindrances from “within”, nor money, nor wife and children — hindrances from “without”. None of these things should hinder him from cleaving to G‑d. By renouncing them all he sets aside even his most important needs for the sake of his love of G‑d.
FOOTNOTES
1. Parentheses are in the original text.
2. Bava Metzia 84a.
White Mane(Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage)
White Mane From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search White Mane
Promotional poster
Directed by Albert Lamorisse
Produced by Albert Lamorisse
Written by Screenplay:
Albert Lamorisse
Commentary:
James Agee
Albert Lamorisse
Saul J. Turell
Story::
Denys Colomb de Daunant
Narrated by Frank Silvera
Les Marshak
Starring Alain Emery
Music by Maurice Leroux
Cinematography Edmond Séchan
Editing by Georges Alépée
Distributed by Films Montsouris
Janus Films
Release date(s) March 1953
Running time 47 minutes (France)
31 minutes (USA)
Country France
Language French
White Mane (French: Crin-Blanc and Crin Blanc, Cheval Sauvage) is a 1953 short film directed by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse.
The forty-seven minute short, filmed on location in the marshes of Camargue, France, won numerous awards on its release, including the Short Film Palme d'Or Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film also became popular with children and was marketed for them. The story tells a fable of how a young boy tames a wild white stallion called White Mane.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot
PlotIn the marshes of Camargue, France, a herd of wild horses roam free. Their leader is a handsome white-haired stallion named White Mane (Crin Blanc in French).
A group of ranchers capture the wild stallion and place him in a corral. Yet White Mane escapes. A boy named Folco (Alain Emery), who lives with his fisherman grandfather, watches intently as White Mane escapes, and he dreams of one day handling White Mane. The ranchers once again try to capture White Mane and fail. Folco asks the men if he can have the white horse. Yes, says one of the men, "but first you have to catch him, but your fish will grow wings before you can manage that."
Later Folco comes across White Mane in the marshes, and he tries to rope him. However, White Mane gallops and drags Folco in the water for quite a while. Folco refuses to let go of the rope and almost passes out. White Mane relents and the two become friends.
White Mane returns to his herd and another horse challenges him for dominance. White Mane loses the fight and returns to join the boy.
The ranchers return and try to spook White Mane by setting fire to the area he and his herd live in. Folco jumps on White Mane (for the first time) and rides him bareback across the marshes of Camargue, over the sparse dunes to the sea. The ranchers give chase and surround them, but they refuse to be caught. With Folco on his back, White Mane rides into the sea. The film ends as the narrator states that White Mane took Folco to an island where horses and children can be friends forever.
2 Cast
CastAlain Emery as Folco, the boy
Pierre Bestieux
Denys Colomb Daunant
Alain Colomb Daunant
Charles Fouhetty
Jean-Pierre Grenie as Narrator (French language)
Charles Guillaume
Pascal Lamorisse
Pierre Moureaux-Nery
Francois Perie
Laurent Roche
Frank Silvera as Narrator (English language)
Les Marshak as Narrator (English language)
3 Background
3.1 The horse
The horseMain article: Camargue (horse)
The story is based on real horses that are found in the Camargue region in southeast France. For centuries, possibly thousands of years, these small horses have lived wild in the harsh environment of the wetlands of the Rhône delta, the Camargue marshes, developing the stamina, hardiness and agility for which they are known today. They are the traditional mount of the gardians – Camargue "cowboys."
Camargue horses galloping through water, as does Crin Blanc in the film, are a popular and romantic image of the region.
3.2 Filming locations
Filming locationsMain article: Camargue
The film was shot entirely on location in the southeast region of France;[citation needed] specifically the Petite Camargue (little Camargue), Bouches-du-Rhône, France, a marsh area located south of Arles, between the Mediterranean Sea and the two branches of the Rhône river delta.
4 Critical reception
Critical receptionThe film, since its first release in 1953, has generally received favorable reviews from critics. When the picture was rereleased in late 2007 by Janus Films, Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times, Terrence said the short "is among the world’s most famous and most honored films for children... But kids’ stuff [it is] not... The tone of [the] film is that of open mouthed wonder." In White Mane, Rafferty wrote, "you sense, as in few other films, the real terrors of nature... And Lamorisse, [the] movie show, really was a remarkable artist: one of the cinema’s best poets and a fearless explorer of the scary and exhilarating outbacks of the imagination."[1]
Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post liked the mise en scène, writing "there are perfectly worthy reasons to keep [the film] in circulation. Visually, [it is] masterful." However, Kennicott argues that the film takes place in a world of lies. He wrote, "A boy and his horse are hunted down by adult ranchers — while a narrator makes vague promises of a better world to come. The beautiful imagery of [the film] is deployed in support of a moral system — a blunt promise of rewards for good behavior — not much more sophisticated than that of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Ah, the time-honored tradition of adults indoctrinating kids in a world-view that will lead only to bitter disappointment, unless the kids refuse to grow up."[2]
5 Distribution
DistributionOn March 19, 1967, it was paired with the 1959 US short "The Boy Who Owned a Melephant" as an episode of the television anthology series The CBS Children's Film Festival.[3]
In late 2007, the film, along with director Albert Lamorisse's later short The Red Balloon (1956), was restored and rereleased by Janus Films. The film was remastered by Janus Films in 35mm format.[4]
A four-minute clip of the film is on the rotating list of programming on the cable television network Classic Arts Showcase.[citation needed
5.1 Video and DVD
Video and DVDA version of the film was released in the United States on June 30, 1993 by Columbia TriStar Home Video, under the label "Children's Treasures Present."[citation needed]
Homevision released the film in video, combined with Albert Lamorisse's fantasy short The Red Balloon on June 13, 2000.[citation needed]
The Criterion Collection released a laserdisc of the film in 1986, produced by Criterion, Janus Films, and Voyager Press. Included in the disc was Lamorisse's The Red Balloon. Criterion released a DVD of the film in 2008.[5]
6 Awards
AwardsWins
Cannes Film Festival: Palme d'Or, Best Short Film, Albert Lamorisse; 1953.
Prix Jean Vigo: Prix Jean Vigo, Short Film, Albert Lamorisse; 1953.
Nominations
British Academy of Film and Television Arts: BAFTA Film Award, Best Documentary Film, France; 1954.
7 References
References1.^ Refferty, Terrence (November 11, 2007). "Two Short Fables That Revel in Freedom". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/movies/11raff.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin. Retrieved December 1, 2007.
2.^ Hunnicott, Philip (November 23, 2007). "'Red Balloon' and 'White Mane': Childhood Colored by Adult Cynicism". The Washington Post: p. C01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201315.html.
3.^ The CBS Children's Film Festival 1967 (fan site). Archived from the original on April 24, 2012.
4.^ White Mane at Janus Films; web site includes trailer of film. Last accessed: December 3, 2007.
5.^ White Mane at Janus Films; web site includes trailer of film. Last accessed: December 3, 2007.
8 External links
External linksWhite Mane at the Internet Movie Database
White Mane at AllRovi
White Mane at Kiddie Matinee
White Mane at Janus Films; includes trailer of film
_______________________________________________________________________
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201315.html
Movies
'Red Balloon' and 'White Mane': Childhood Colored by Adult Cynicism
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By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 23, 2007
The average, hyperactive, plugged-in modern child is not likely to sit through the 1956 French classic "The Red Balloon" without a lot of fussing and whining. This almost legendary film, aimed at children and at adults who like to think they haven't lost their connection to childhood, is devoid of the usual trappings of today's kiddie cinema: no flatulence jokes, no aping the manners and language of infantilized adults, no spittle or snot or other fetish liquids of childhood. It is a cinematic love letter to a fantasy of Paris, seen through the eyes of a little boy who befriends a red balloon with all the wide-eyed, trusting innocence that a boy can shower on a puppy.
It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and it is a mainstay of many critic's top 10 lists. It is now being rereleased, paired with the 1953 "White Mane," another film by director Albert Lamorisse. Each work clocks in at under an hour, and it's good to see them side by side, even if the earlier "White Mane" (about a boy's love for a horse) feels a bit like a clunky trial run for the more accomplished and austere narrative exercise that is "The Red Balloon."
Almost everyone who has seen one of these films ("White Mane" is decidedly the rarer of the two) remembers Lamorisse's work fondly. Both films are about young boys and the dangers and possibilities of friendship. In "White Mane," the drama plays out in an idealized world of simple fisherman with nary a whiff of anything modern in its pastoral landscapes. In "The Red Balloon," the hero is a schoolboy (Lamorisse's son, Pascal), the setting postwar Paris, untouched by the war or anything remotely un-French. Both films are considered gorgeous fables, simple stories but pregnant with sad commentary on the fragility of innocence and the tragic pragmatism of the adult world.
Critics have favored these films not just because they are beautifully shot, but because their very spareness allows for a lot of intellectual imposition and interpretation. The red balloon may be a Freudian sign of burgeoning sexuality -- a reading made plausible when a little girl with a blue balloon wanders into the film for a brief suggestion of romance. The balloon may also be a sign calling attention to the unseen hand of the filmmaker -- as if the director is saying, hey, through the miracle of film, I can make any inanimate object into a viable dramatic character. The film becomes a meta-commentary on the power of film. You can go much further with these lines of thought. You can write a graduate thesis on the subject.
This sort of interpretation is likely very annoying to people who want to remember the films as simple and pure. But watch them again, and it's clear they are anything but pure. Lamorisse's Paris is basically photographer Eug¿ne Atget's glistening and empty city peopled by characters straight out of the old "Madeline" children's books. It doesn't exist, it didn't exist in 1956, and it probably never existed, except in carefully constructed French fantasies. And Lamorisse's vision of peasant life in the South of France, in the Camargue, never existed either. These films take place in a world of lies.
Innocent lies? Not necessarily. "The Red Balloon" may be the most seamless fusion of capitalism and Christianity ever put on film. A young boy invests in a red balloon, the love of which places him on the outside of society. The balloon is hunted down and killed on a barren hilltop -- think Calvary -- by a mob of cruel boys. The ending, a bizarre emotional sucker punch, is straight out of the New Testament.
Thus is investment rewarded -- with Christian transcendence or, at least, an old-fashioned Assumption. This might be sweet. Or it might be a very cynical reduction of the primary impulse to religious faith. In "White Mane," the sacrifice is even more explicit. A boy and his horse are hunted down by adult ranchers -- while a narrator makes vague promises of a better world to come.
The beautiful imagery of both films is deployed in support of a moral system -- a blunt promise of rewards for good behavior -- not much more sophisticated than that of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Ah, the time-honored tradition of adults indoctrinating kids in a worldview that will lead only to bitter disappointment, unless the kids refuse to grow up. Which seems to be increasingly the case.
If you're angry right now that the innocence of Lamorisse's message has been trampled beneath the boot of cynical criticism, good. That's the point. These are kiddie films, and adults shouldn't be there for the simple enjoyment of watching a story unfold. Perhaps the best adult response to these films would be critical detachment and a profound sense of relief: There they are, the old lies we tell kids, and thank goodness we don't believe them anymore.
There are perfectly worthy reasons to keep these films in circulation. Visually, they are masterful. And it's fascinating to see children's films in which children are not running the show, and there's no subversively sly adult meta-level filled with knowing jokes that fly right over the heads of the little ones. But in their very purity, in their resolutely adult vision of a child's supposed moral universe, these two films are profoundly manipulative.
Red Balloon and White Mane (72 minutes at Landmark's E Street Cinema) are not rated and contain peril and violence to animals.
__________________________________________________________________________
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/White_Mane/70085456?trkid=496624
White Mane(Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage)
195340mNRRate 5 starsRate 4 starsRate 3 starsRate 2 starsRate 1 starNot InterestedClearSaving.....Our best guess for Edward:
4.9 stars.Average of 14,012 ratings:
3.3 stars ..A young boy (Alain Emery) grows entranced with a magnificent wild horse in a remote part of southern France after watching the local cowboys try to break it. Sensing that the lad's motives are different, the stallion slowly lets the young rider tame him. Director Albert Lamorisse shows nature at its most raw and powerful in an unforgettable tale of trust and freedom that was honored with the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
What a cinematic Black and White 40 minute masterpiece! I have no clue how Director Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon) managed to film White Mane - the photography of the horses and horseback riding are phenomenal. The story is simple: White Mane is a magnificent wild stallion, leader of the herd of wild horses; Wranglers capture White Mane with his herd but he manages to escape, several times; an absolutely angelic looking (even dressed in white) young boy, Folco (Alain Emery), manages to befriend White Mane, and is able to ride him; after many chases these two escape the evil wranglers. Actually the ending is somewhat ambiguous - there are two possible outcomes of the final escape scene and you're left to your own conclusions. The young Alain Emery is obviously a very accomplished horseman - scenes of him riding bareback are stunning. The scenery of Southern France is beautiful - the moors, the swamps, the ocean are all captured by the camera during the chase scenes. The music soundtrack uses a full orchestra, with certain instruments representing White Mane, Folco, and the wranglers - sort of a theme for each. There's very little narrative, which is in French, however, there is a narrator that does a voice-over in English, which I thought worked really well. I felt White Mane is a real classic, and do highly recommend a viewing.
Whilst in grade school (Le Lac Region, FR), we all enjoyed Crin-Blanc, WHITE MANE: One of the works by adored Albert Lamorosse (films aimed at our poignant young imaginations) (see also, Le Ballon Rouge). His works are likened to imaginative poetry brought to life. Crin-Blanc was the wildest of a very wild herd of Camargue horses (white mane flowing in the wind). Metaphorically, the boy who could not live in this world, escaped into the fantasy water world of the river with his mystical horse, Crin-Blanc. I am so happy this film has been made available by NF. 4 stars for the escape back to childhood. Coco C (June 17, 2010)
What a truly beautiful movie about the connection between a young boy and a white wild horse! The black and white cinematography is just stunning! I wish the film was longer than just a mere 40 minutes, but within that short time you begin to realize that perhaps horses need to run wild. There's a great scene in which 2 white horses sparring and then the one which the young boy attempts and succeeds in taming this white maned horse, when grown men couldn't do. While it is about a boy and a horse, I don't think the ending is suitable for younger children. Really worth watching
I enjoyed this movie immensely! I appreciated the message and certainly the cinematography. The wildness of the land and the beauty was captured quite well. I wonder how they were able to film the animal scenes (much less the scenes of the young boy riding). The only thing I didn't like was the ...read moreending, as I didn't necessarily come to the same conclusion that was narrated. I struck me too much of the "your dog went to live on a farm where she'll be very happy" line. :( But it could have been interpreted in a different way also. I suppose that is left to the viewer to decide.
Promotional poster
Directed by Albert Lamorisse
Produced by Albert Lamorisse
Written by Screenplay:
Albert Lamorisse
Commentary:
James Agee
Albert Lamorisse
Saul J. Turell
Story::
Denys Colomb de Daunant
Narrated by Frank Silvera
Les Marshak
Starring Alain Emery
Music by Maurice Leroux
Cinematography Edmond Séchan
Editing by Georges Alépée
Distributed by Films Montsouris
Janus Films
Release date(s) March 1953
Running time 47 minutes (France)
31 minutes (USA)
Country France
Language French
White Mane (French: Crin-Blanc and Crin Blanc, Cheval Sauvage) is a 1953 short film directed by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse.
The forty-seven minute short, filmed on location in the marshes of Camargue, France, won numerous awards on its release, including the Short Film Palme d'Or Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film also became popular with children and was marketed for them. The story tells a fable of how a young boy tames a wild white stallion called White Mane.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot
PlotIn the marshes of Camargue, France, a herd of wild horses roam free. Their leader is a handsome white-haired stallion named White Mane (Crin Blanc in French).
A group of ranchers capture the wild stallion and place him in a corral. Yet White Mane escapes. A boy named Folco (Alain Emery), who lives with his fisherman grandfather, watches intently as White Mane escapes, and he dreams of one day handling White Mane. The ranchers once again try to capture White Mane and fail. Folco asks the men if he can have the white horse. Yes, says one of the men, "but first you have to catch him, but your fish will grow wings before you can manage that."
Later Folco comes across White Mane in the marshes, and he tries to rope him. However, White Mane gallops and drags Folco in the water for quite a while. Folco refuses to let go of the rope and almost passes out. White Mane relents and the two become friends.
White Mane returns to his herd and another horse challenges him for dominance. White Mane loses the fight and returns to join the boy.
The ranchers return and try to spook White Mane by setting fire to the area he and his herd live in. Folco jumps on White Mane (for the first time) and rides him bareback across the marshes of Camargue, over the sparse dunes to the sea. The ranchers give chase and surround them, but they refuse to be caught. With Folco on his back, White Mane rides into the sea. The film ends as the narrator states that White Mane took Folco to an island where horses and children can be friends forever.
2 Cast
CastAlain Emery as Folco, the boy
Pierre Bestieux
Denys Colomb Daunant
Alain Colomb Daunant
Charles Fouhetty
Jean-Pierre Grenie as Narrator (French language)
Charles Guillaume
Pascal Lamorisse
Pierre Moureaux-Nery
Francois Perie
Laurent Roche
Frank Silvera as Narrator (English language)
Les Marshak as Narrator (English language)
3 Background
3.1 The horse
The horseMain article: Camargue (horse)
The story is based on real horses that are found in the Camargue region in southeast France. For centuries, possibly thousands of years, these small horses have lived wild in the harsh environment of the wetlands of the Rhône delta, the Camargue marshes, developing the stamina, hardiness and agility for which they are known today. They are the traditional mount of the gardians – Camargue "cowboys."
Camargue horses galloping through water, as does Crin Blanc in the film, are a popular and romantic image of the region.
3.2 Filming locations
Filming locationsMain article: Camargue
The film was shot entirely on location in the southeast region of France;[citation needed] specifically the Petite Camargue (little Camargue), Bouches-du-Rhône, France, a marsh area located south of Arles, between the Mediterranean Sea and the two branches of the Rhône river delta.
4 Critical reception
Critical receptionThe film, since its first release in 1953, has generally received favorable reviews from critics. When the picture was rereleased in late 2007 by Janus Films, Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times, Terrence said the short "is among the world’s most famous and most honored films for children... But kids’ stuff [it is] not... The tone of [the] film is that of open mouthed wonder." In White Mane, Rafferty wrote, "you sense, as in few other films, the real terrors of nature... And Lamorisse, [the] movie show, really was a remarkable artist: one of the cinema’s best poets and a fearless explorer of the scary and exhilarating outbacks of the imagination."[1]
Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post liked the mise en scène, writing "there are perfectly worthy reasons to keep [the film] in circulation. Visually, [it is] masterful." However, Kennicott argues that the film takes place in a world of lies. He wrote, "A boy and his horse are hunted down by adult ranchers — while a narrator makes vague promises of a better world to come. The beautiful imagery of [the film] is deployed in support of a moral system — a blunt promise of rewards for good behavior — not much more sophisticated than that of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Ah, the time-honored tradition of adults indoctrinating kids in a world-view that will lead only to bitter disappointment, unless the kids refuse to grow up."[2]
5 Distribution
DistributionOn March 19, 1967, it was paired with the 1959 US short "The Boy Who Owned a Melephant" as an episode of the television anthology series The CBS Children's Film Festival.[3]
In late 2007, the film, along with director Albert Lamorisse's later short The Red Balloon (1956), was restored and rereleased by Janus Films. The film was remastered by Janus Films in 35mm format.[4]
A four-minute clip of the film is on the rotating list of programming on the cable television network Classic Arts Showcase.[citation needed
5.1 Video and DVD
Video and DVDA version of the film was released in the United States on June 30, 1993 by Columbia TriStar Home Video, under the label "Children's Treasures Present."[citation needed]
Homevision released the film in video, combined with Albert Lamorisse's fantasy short The Red Balloon on June 13, 2000.[citation needed]
The Criterion Collection released a laserdisc of the film in 1986, produced by Criterion, Janus Films, and Voyager Press. Included in the disc was Lamorisse's The Red Balloon. Criterion released a DVD of the film in 2008.[5]
6 Awards
AwardsWins
Cannes Film Festival: Palme d'Or, Best Short Film, Albert Lamorisse; 1953.
Prix Jean Vigo: Prix Jean Vigo, Short Film, Albert Lamorisse; 1953.
Nominations
British Academy of Film and Television Arts: BAFTA Film Award, Best Documentary Film, France; 1954.
7 References
References1.^ Refferty, Terrence (November 11, 2007). "Two Short Fables That Revel in Freedom". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/movies/11raff.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin. Retrieved December 1, 2007.
2.^ Hunnicott, Philip (November 23, 2007). "'Red Balloon' and 'White Mane': Childhood Colored by Adult Cynicism". The Washington Post: p. C01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201315.html.
3.^ The CBS Children's Film Festival 1967 (fan site). Archived from the original on April 24, 2012.
4.^ White Mane at Janus Films; web site includes trailer of film. Last accessed: December 3, 2007.
5.^ White Mane at Janus Films; web site includes trailer of film. Last accessed: December 3, 2007.
8 External links
External linksWhite Mane at the Internet Movie Database
White Mane at AllRovi
White Mane at Kiddie Matinee
White Mane at Janus Films; includes trailer of film
_______________________________________________________________________
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201315.html
Movies
'Red Balloon' and 'White Mane': Childhood Colored by Adult Cynicism
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By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 23, 2007
The average, hyperactive, plugged-in modern child is not likely to sit through the 1956 French classic "The Red Balloon" without a lot of fussing and whining. This almost legendary film, aimed at children and at adults who like to think they haven't lost their connection to childhood, is devoid of the usual trappings of today's kiddie cinema: no flatulence jokes, no aping the manners and language of infantilized adults, no spittle or snot or other fetish liquids of childhood. It is a cinematic love letter to a fantasy of Paris, seen through the eyes of a little boy who befriends a red balloon with all the wide-eyed, trusting innocence that a boy can shower on a puppy.
It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and it is a mainstay of many critic's top 10 lists. It is now being rereleased, paired with the 1953 "White Mane," another film by director Albert Lamorisse. Each work clocks in at under an hour, and it's good to see them side by side, even if the earlier "White Mane" (about a boy's love for a horse) feels a bit like a clunky trial run for the more accomplished and austere narrative exercise that is "The Red Balloon."
Almost everyone who has seen one of these films ("White Mane" is decidedly the rarer of the two) remembers Lamorisse's work fondly. Both films are about young boys and the dangers and possibilities of friendship. In "White Mane," the drama plays out in an idealized world of simple fisherman with nary a whiff of anything modern in its pastoral landscapes. In "The Red Balloon," the hero is a schoolboy (Lamorisse's son, Pascal), the setting postwar Paris, untouched by the war or anything remotely un-French. Both films are considered gorgeous fables, simple stories but pregnant with sad commentary on the fragility of innocence and the tragic pragmatism of the adult world.
Critics have favored these films not just because they are beautifully shot, but because their very spareness allows for a lot of intellectual imposition and interpretation. The red balloon may be a Freudian sign of burgeoning sexuality -- a reading made plausible when a little girl with a blue balloon wanders into the film for a brief suggestion of romance. The balloon may also be a sign calling attention to the unseen hand of the filmmaker -- as if the director is saying, hey, through the miracle of film, I can make any inanimate object into a viable dramatic character. The film becomes a meta-commentary on the power of film. You can go much further with these lines of thought. You can write a graduate thesis on the subject.
This sort of interpretation is likely very annoying to people who want to remember the films as simple and pure. But watch them again, and it's clear they are anything but pure. Lamorisse's Paris is basically photographer Eug¿ne Atget's glistening and empty city peopled by characters straight out of the old "Madeline" children's books. It doesn't exist, it didn't exist in 1956, and it probably never existed, except in carefully constructed French fantasies. And Lamorisse's vision of peasant life in the South of France, in the Camargue, never existed either. These films take place in a world of lies.
Innocent lies? Not necessarily. "The Red Balloon" may be the most seamless fusion of capitalism and Christianity ever put on film. A young boy invests in a red balloon, the love of which places him on the outside of society. The balloon is hunted down and killed on a barren hilltop -- think Calvary -- by a mob of cruel boys. The ending, a bizarre emotional sucker punch, is straight out of the New Testament.
Thus is investment rewarded -- with Christian transcendence or, at least, an old-fashioned Assumption. This might be sweet. Or it might be a very cynical reduction of the primary impulse to religious faith. In "White Mane," the sacrifice is even more explicit. A boy and his horse are hunted down by adult ranchers -- while a narrator makes vague promises of a better world to come.
The beautiful imagery of both films is deployed in support of a moral system -- a blunt promise of rewards for good behavior -- not much more sophisticated than that of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Ah, the time-honored tradition of adults indoctrinating kids in a worldview that will lead only to bitter disappointment, unless the kids refuse to grow up. Which seems to be increasingly the case.
If you're angry right now that the innocence of Lamorisse's message has been trampled beneath the boot of cynical criticism, good. That's the point. These are kiddie films, and adults shouldn't be there for the simple enjoyment of watching a story unfold. Perhaps the best adult response to these films would be critical detachment and a profound sense of relief: There they are, the old lies we tell kids, and thank goodness we don't believe them anymore.
There are perfectly worthy reasons to keep these films in circulation. Visually, they are masterful. And it's fascinating to see children's films in which children are not running the show, and there's no subversively sly adult meta-level filled with knowing jokes that fly right over the heads of the little ones. But in their very purity, in their resolutely adult vision of a child's supposed moral universe, these two films are profoundly manipulative.
Red Balloon and White Mane (72 minutes at Landmark's E Street Cinema) are not rated and contain peril and violence to animals.
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http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/White_Mane/70085456?trkid=496624
White Mane(Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage)
195340mNRRate 5 starsRate 4 starsRate 3 starsRate 2 starsRate 1 starNot InterestedClearSaving.....Our best guess for Edward:
4.9 stars.Average of 14,012 ratings:
3.3 stars ..A young boy (Alain Emery) grows entranced with a magnificent wild horse in a remote part of southern France after watching the local cowboys try to break it. Sensing that the lad's motives are different, the stallion slowly lets the young rider tame him. Director Albert Lamorisse shows nature at its most raw and powerful in an unforgettable tale of trust and freedom that was honored with the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
What a cinematic Black and White 40 minute masterpiece! I have no clue how Director Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon) managed to film White Mane - the photography of the horses and horseback riding are phenomenal. The story is simple: White Mane is a magnificent wild stallion, leader of the herd of wild horses; Wranglers capture White Mane with his herd but he manages to escape, several times; an absolutely angelic looking (even dressed in white) young boy, Folco (Alain Emery), manages to befriend White Mane, and is able to ride him; after many chases these two escape the evil wranglers. Actually the ending is somewhat ambiguous - there are two possible outcomes of the final escape scene and you're left to your own conclusions. The young Alain Emery is obviously a very accomplished horseman - scenes of him riding bareback are stunning. The scenery of Southern France is beautiful - the moors, the swamps, the ocean are all captured by the camera during the chase scenes. The music soundtrack uses a full orchestra, with certain instruments representing White Mane, Folco, and the wranglers - sort of a theme for each. There's very little narrative, which is in French, however, there is a narrator that does a voice-over in English, which I thought worked really well. I felt White Mane is a real classic, and do highly recommend a viewing.
Whilst in grade school (Le Lac Region, FR), we all enjoyed Crin-Blanc, WHITE MANE: One of the works by adored Albert Lamorosse (films aimed at our poignant young imaginations) (see also, Le Ballon Rouge). His works are likened to imaginative poetry brought to life. Crin-Blanc was the wildest of a very wild herd of Camargue horses (white mane flowing in the wind). Metaphorically, the boy who could not live in this world, escaped into the fantasy water world of the river with his mystical horse, Crin-Blanc. I am so happy this film has been made available by NF. 4 stars for the escape back to childhood. Coco C (June 17, 2010)
What a truly beautiful movie about the connection between a young boy and a white wild horse! The black and white cinematography is just stunning! I wish the film was longer than just a mere 40 minutes, but within that short time you begin to realize that perhaps horses need to run wild. There's a great scene in which 2 white horses sparring and then the one which the young boy attempts and succeeds in taming this white maned horse, when grown men couldn't do. While it is about a boy and a horse, I don't think the ending is suitable for younger children. Really worth watching
I enjoyed this movie immensely! I appreciated the message and certainly the cinematography. The wildness of the land and the beauty was captured quite well. I wonder how they were able to film the animal scenes (much less the scenes of the young boy riding). The only thing I didn't like was the ...read moreending, as I didn't necessarily come to the same conclusion that was narrated. I struck me too much of the "your dog went to live on a farm where she'll be very happy" line. :( But it could have been interpreted in a different way also. I suppose that is left to the viewer to decide.
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