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A vote is being held for 2007's most self-hating Jews of the year at Yid With Lid. There are 4 categories:
Each Nominee has at least one hyper-linked article supporting their case--why they should win in their category.
Why are there so many Jewish comedians?
There's always something very cool to me about the fact that Australians celebrate the New Year so far ahead of us - and this is emphasized by the fact that pictures are now so readily available on the internet. Here they are, ushering in 2008, just like we will be many hours from now:
"Guilt and Pleasure" is a terrific magazine, each issue of which is devoted to a different subject - all of Jewish orientation, though many would be of interest to anyone and everyone. The publishers intend it to be used to engender salon-like discussion. I don't know how they stay in business because they post each and every article in its entirety on the internet. I suspect that if and when they gather enough regular readers, they will stop doing so. In the meantime, there are a few excellent and interesting pieces from their latest issue (the "sound" issue, which includes many articles about the music industry) that I'd like to bring to your attention. They are well-written and as my kids like to put it, "edumacational":
1. The Jewish roots of scat?
Scat — vocal solo composed of nonsense syllables — first appeared in Louis Armstrong’s 1926 song “The Heebie Jeebies Dance.” Armstrong initially claimed that back in the days of one-take recording, with no technology to add in an overdub, he had dropped the sheet music and just began singing sounds on the spot as a substitute for the missing lyrics. However, Armstrong reportedly later told fellow bandleader Cab Calloway and others that scat derived from the sound he described as “the Jews’ rockin,” which he had heard growing up in a mixed black-Jewish neighborhood in New Orleans.
Fans have come up with two interpretations of this: either Armstrong was walking past a synagogue and heard rapid-fire davening, which struck his ear as nonsense, or he heard nigunim, Hasidic melodies intended to induce a meditative state before prayer (nigunim can also serve as lullabies).
In his writings, Armstrong also recalled lullabies sung by a Mrs. Karnofsky — a woman whose family befriended and employed him as a kid, and to whom he largely attributes his admiration of Jews and Jewish life.
Could Hebrew have inspired the “heebie jeebies”?
Scat was soon ubiquitous, with Armstrong’s friend Calloway becoming a second master of the form. In his greatest hit, “Minnie the Moocher,” Calloway calls out scat phrases and his band responds in black gospel style, yet the minor key and sweeping sound of his scat also recalls cantorial song. More
2. Tin Pan Alley - A Jewish industry killed by a Jew. Guess who and how?
During the sweltering summer of 1962, Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” piped over and over — and over — through transistor radios and up the charts. Its catchy hook and painfully simple lyrics (Remember when you held me tight / And you kissed me all through the night / Think of all that we’ve been through / And breaking up is har d to do) were the sort of formulaic ingredients that fed the Tin Pan Alley hit factory where Sedaka worked and that dominated popular music at the time.
“Every time I ran out of lyrics, I’d throw in a ‘doo-be-doo,’ and it became a trademark,” Sedaka told Mix magazine a few years ago. “In fact, the night before we tracked ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,’ I called up our arranger, Alan Lorber, and told him I wanted to incorporate ‘down dooby doo down down’ as a prominent part of the vocal arrangement. The record came to be known as the sandwich song. There’s a piece of bread to begin with — the syllabization — then the meat and finally another piece of bread. All of my hits in the ’50s and ’60s used this same technique.”
It was, for a time, an unbeatable system. But the following year brought an attack on Tin Pan Alley, the Midtown Manhattan hit-making industry that produced so many songs like Sedaka’s and whose hooks still resonate more than forty years later. While Sedaka, along with Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Carole (Klein) King, Gerry Goffin, Cynthia Weill, Howie Greenberg, Barry Mann, Jeff Barry, Burt Bacharach, Ellie Greenwich, and dozens of others churned out hits from cramped offices in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway and its sister (and rival) center at 1650 Broadway — the heart of Tin Pan Alley — Greenwich Village was nurturing an assault on popular music that in the end resulted in the demise of the hit-making business uptown. More
3. Jonathan Richman, suburban Jew, outsider, and with his band the Modern Lovers, a forerunner of punk rock:
For the purpose of making sense of Jonathan Richman, the ideas of Polish-Jewish Marxist Isaac Deutscher are helpful. In his famous 1958 essay “The Non-Jewish Jew,” Deutscher attempted to explain why Jews ranked highly among modern Europe’s most innovative thinkers: people such as Spinoza, Marx, and Freud. He did not attribute this to superior genes or religious values; instead, Deutscher came up with a sociological explanation. Many of Europe’s great iconoclasts, he said, were Jews who had “looked for ideals and fulfillment” beyond Jewry but could not gain full entry into the larger, gentile society. As outsiders twice over, these “non-Jewish Jews” adhered to no entrenched beliefs. They could perceive what members of the majority could not, leading them to develop all sorts of subversive theories in the arts and sciences. Those theories were born out of a certain Jewish condition without expressing any directly Jewish beliefs.
Deutscher did not write “The Non-Jewish Jew” with young, postwar, suburban Jews in mind; he likely would have seen them as too affluent, assimilated, and contented compared to the people he discussed. What Deutscher wouldn’t have been able to perceive, however, was the dissonance many Jews felt in suburban America. Jewish kids typically weren’t captains of the football team or homecoming queens. They weren’t likely to be voted Cutest or Most Desired Desert Island Companion, although they stood a good chance of winning Funniest or Class Treasurer. They worried about their noses and hard-to-manage hair and the humiliation of having to shave a nascent moustache in the seventh grade. They faced occasional taunts and the odd punch. And they suffered through Hebrew school several days a week while their gentile peers ran free. Those suburban Jews were not ostracized, but they didn’t quite fit into the mainstream, either.
They had two basic choices, the Jews of suburbia. They could try to adapt (which entailed its own psychological and practical challenges) or go their own way. Jonathan Richman chose the second route. More
Haveil Havalim #147 is now posted at SoccerDad's. Catch up on a week's worth of the best posts of the JBlogosphere. Subjects include Jewish culture, Torah, antisemitism, Israel, history, personal and politics. Find new blogs, learn new things - - well worth your time.
This was the first vacation we've taken with all three kids in three years. Everyone was happy to be there and to spend time together. Dozens of shehechiyanus would not have been enough. We had a fabulous time.
The foggy special effect in the first picture came courtesy of the humidity, which caused the camera lens to fog up:
Something is a little strange in the perspective below. The man is not as small in comparison to the trees as it appears - he's actually much further away:
I was a little disappointed that there weren't more colorful flowers in the Dominican Republic, but I did find these interesting looking ones:
No words could describe this sight, which the picture does not do justice. The moon was full and shining very brightly. It would have been a better picture if I'd remembered to bring along a tri-pod:
The sun shows up after a fast moving rainstorm:
Horseback riding on the beach:
Sailing to Saona Island on a catamaran. Saona Island is on the Caribbean side of the Dominican Republic. The water is warmer, very calm and clear aqua. At Punta Cana (the main resort area of the country), the Atlantic Ocean meets with the Caribbean and the water is darker green and has bigger waves.
Sunset through the window of the bus on the way back to the hotel. I took several very bad pictures as we lurched and bounced around the many potholes that dot the roads in the DR. They make driving anywhere a roller coaster-like adventure:
Really enjoyed the trip. The people are very friendly, have a good sense of humor, are proud of their country and happy that Americans want to visit. The food was just ok - lots of pork is served, which I don't eat. There were many American Jews were there over Christmas - also a lot of Brits, a few Aussies, Germans, Japanese and French. Our sons said the Brits were a lot of fun at the bar late at night. One took over as bartender, apologizing because he couldn't serve the beer at the proper temperature - it was too cold.
We were all introduced to the DR national drink, mamajuana. Everyone does a double-take at the name. Eldest son brought some of the tree bark and herbs home to give to friends (we were totally ignorant of the fact that it is advertised as an aphrodisiac until we got home and looked it up on the internet - just thought it was an interesting and tasty aperitif) and got stopped going through customs. Fortunately, we had a souvenir bottle of rum (photographers are everywhere taking pics of folks and pasting them on things. we bought one on a bottle of rum) and the customs agent opened it and poured it over the mamajuana fixins. Apparently, you can't take the stuff into the states dry.
Everything is just a bit on the edge of wild in the DR. It hasn't turned into Disneyland yet which is what makes it so much fun.
Sung by Yosef Karduner:
121:1 A Song of Ascents. I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: from whence shall my help come? 121:2 My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. 121:3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; He that keepeth thee will not slumber. 121:4 Behold, He that keepeth Israel doth neither slumber nor sleep. 121:5 the Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. 121:6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. 121:7 the Lord shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul. 121:8 the Lord shall guard thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and for ever. |
Senior Qaeda Theologian Urges Followers to End Jihad - Eli Lake (New York Sun)
- One of al-Qaeda's senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of 9/11 were a "catastrophe for all Muslims." In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and even calls for the formation of a special Islamic court to try bin Laden and his comrade, Ayman al-Zawahri.
- Sharif, currently serving a life sentence in Egypt, wrote in the 1980s two of the modern seminal texts for Sunni jihadism and in particular al-Qaeda, in Fundamental Concepts Regarding Jihad and The Five Ground Rules for the Achieving of Victory or Its Absence. Those books are scholarly justifications, citing the Koran and Hadiths, for joining a war against Muslim apostates such as the Egyptian ruling class and for a broader jihad against America.
- Sharif's latest texts are a renunciation of his earlier work, saying the military jihad against apostate states and America is futile.
- The director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, Frank Cilluffo, said, "Here you have someone with the stature and credibility, who more or less wrote the book on jihadism and is oft cited by other jihadists, making the case against it. This is someone with the heft on legal and religious grounds to make the counter argument that we can't."
- The author of Inside Al-Qaeda, Rohan Gunaratna, said he believed Sharif's conversion was genuine. "He has had a genuine change of heart because we are seeing a trend today in Egypt where the original members of both of the major jihadist organizations are turning....The traditional jihad movement is almost coming to an end. What has it accomplished in more than 25 years?"
Sometimes we come across things on the internet that we'd really rather not know exist. A giant rat, for example.
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I received 56 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you? |
| Guess the Sci-Fi Movie Sounds hereCanon powershot | |
This song. It's been stuck there for days. I kind of like it, so it's ok.
Discussed in a brief but interesting article here.
With regard to donations given to the palestinians, Ocean Guy writes:
We know that the more money given to the palestinians, the more murders there are, and as always, Israel will be to blame.
The world does not… or will not… recognize that their efforts to ease the suffering of the palestinians will ALWAYS fail because the palestinians only exist through their suffering. If the suffering is eliminated so are the palestinians. If the palestinians were to build a functioning and prosperous state, the fight would be over which Arab State would absorb the territories. Yes, that’s right, if the misery in the territories was wiped out and the palestinians became prosperous, there would be no second palestinian state. Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia would then be clamoring over themselves to take it over. The people the other Arabs don’t want today, would be prized citizens if they were to somehow become prosperous. But the other Arabs won’t let that happen.
The palestinians exist only as a weapon to be used against Israel and Jews.
Well said and absolutely right on target.
Arabs Desecrate Grave of Biblical Prime Minister Joshua
10 Tevet 5768, 19 December 07 07:21by Ezra HaLevi(IsraelNN.com) Jewish worshippers Tuesday were stunned to find Arabs had desecrated the graves of the Biblical Joshua, Caleb and Nun (Joshua’s father).
Joshua served as the Jewish Nation's Prime Minister from the year 2488 until 2516 on the Hebrew calendar (1272 BCE - 1300 BCE).
Members of the One Shechem organization that organizes visits to the graves arrived in the village of Timnat (Kifl) Haress, near Ariel in Samaria, to prepare for a special prayer gathering, discovered that Arab vandals had desecrated the village’s Jewish tombs. The tombs of Yehoshua (Joshua) ben Nun, Nun, and Calev (Caleb) ben Yefuneh were covered with garbage and feces – both human and animal, and anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans and symbols had been painted in the area.
Nevertheless, worshippers gathered at the tombs Tuesday night for special prayers on the tenth of Tevet, the day Kaddish and other prayers are recited for those whose date of death is unknown, such as Calev ben Yefuneh. Organizers had cleaned up the damage and attendees reported a positive experience.
The prayers were also to mark the end of the 30-day increased-stricture mourning period for murdered Jewish father Ido Zoldan of Kedumim, by a Palestinian Authority police officer.
Organizers reported that a wide array of Jews – hareidi, national religious and traditional – took part in the visit and prayers. They also praised the cooperation of security forces, particularly the Efraim Division of the IDF.
The One Shechem organization issued a call to the public to do everything in their power to preserve the holy sites in Samaria, including Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem and to fight for the right of Jews to visit and worship there freely.
Click here for an Arutz-7 Exclusive Photo Essay of a midnight visit to the graves of Joshua, Calev and Nun.
I wouldn't trade places with the Queen of England. I only wish I could put into words how much, the unmeasurable value, that being a Jew* means to me. But there's no doubt that the heritage brings along some baggage with it.
I am in the middle of a very slow reading of Ruth Wisse's "Jews and Power." Unfortunately, my memory stinks and I don't have the time/opportunity to sit down and read uninterrupted very often. I do a lot of writing (it doesn't all find its way here by any means, and a good deal of it just gets deleted). I don't consider myself a writer (no talent for it) but I still enjoy doing it and find it helps me sort out thoughts. So, a great deal of the time I might spend reading is devoted elsewhere. I plan on taking Wisse's book with me when we go on vacation in a few days. Think I'll bring a long a highlighter as well. It's very relevant to me right now, and I want to learn and remember what she has to teach.
John Podhoretz touches upon some of Wisse's ideas in a must-read post at Contentions. He also describes some episodes of antisemitism through the eyes of a new documentary film, and some thoughts that make me stop and say: This is important to make note of.
*I deliberately frame it as "being a Jew" rather than "being Jewish," because I abhor the fact that the term "Jew" was turned into an epithet. It's just my own small expression of protest. "Being a Jew" encompasses both religion and identity; it is a declaration that I am who I am and I don't care what anyone else thinks.
Jonah Goldberg on Hillary Clinton:
...Her career is indisputably a product of her marriage. But for most of her life, Hillary had an independent ideological identity that now seems to have gone down the memory hole. In her own words, she championed a whole new "politics of meaning" and sought to redefine "who we are as human beings in this postmodern age."
But, bit by bit, she sliced off chunks of her soul. Hillary used to be the personification of hope for the left. On the welfare debate, she was supposed to be Bill's conscience. She was the Eleanor to his Franklin.
But now Hillary is the Democrats' establishment candidate, pitted against the true believer, John Edwards, and the idealist, Obama. Even committed liberals tell focus groups she's too cold, too calculating.
And how did she get that way? She studied at the feet of the master. Bill Clinton cast himself as a champion of the "Third Way," a grandiose political phrase with disturbing intellectual roots. For Bill, it mostly meant that he could split the difference between any two positions. Any hard choice was a "false choice." When asked how he'd have voted on the first Persian Gulf War, he said he agreed with the minority but would have voted with the majority. He smoked pot but didn't inhale. Monica Lewinsky had sex with him, but he could swear under oath he didn't have sex with her.
Bill can make those sorts of things work because he really believes them -- or at least he does as the words are coming out of his mouth. Hillary has nowhere near that sort of skill. She's learned the dance moves and she's memorized the lyrics, but she can't hear the music. That was evident in the now-infamous Oct. 30 debate performance during which she said she was both for and against driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and for and against pulling troops out of Iraq.
In this race, she's tried to be hawk and dove, idealist and pragmatist, martyr and hero. But unlike her husband -- a jazz impresario of people-pleasing prevarication -- she's a terrible liar. She comes across as calculated because that's all that's left to her: calculation. Jesse Jackson once famously said that Bill Clinton had no core beliefs, he was simply "appetite" all the way down. That appetite seems to have become community property in the Clinton household, such as it is.
Obama is surging because Democrats want idealism and hope. Hillary has jettisoned her idealism, and she's filed down her hope to mere yearning.
Her story is fascinating in a way - like a Greek myth or a Shakespeare play.
I just got excited when I saw it was 36 degrees outside. This morning when I drove daughter school, it was only 25. Heat wave! Ya-hoo!
The Palestinian Authority is one big money pit, with donations funneling into it from all over the world. If the funds were actually being used for food, clothing, shelter and peaceful economic infrastructure, I'd have no argument with it. But this is not the case. The money is going toward their efforts to destroy Israel and toward their in-fighting with one another. Daniel Pipes writes:
Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.
The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year.
...innovative research by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims). Graphed together, the two figures show an uncanny echo:
Personally, I don't give a rat's rear end if Hamas and Fatah kill one another, but I do resent my tax dollars aiding and abetting them in their terrorist activities against a major US ally that is a free, democratic, and civilized nation. I dearly wish Bush would regrow the mighty backbone he had at the start of his presidency. Close off the spigot that's feeding the weeds because nothing worthwhile is going to grow there until they are eliminated.
More pictures accompanied by lots of interesting commentary.
Also: Some very nice astronomy wallpaper here. I change my background periodically. Right now, I am using the picture of the Andromeda Galaxy on the left.
I've heard of turducken - the dish where a turkey is stuffed with a duck which has been stuffed with a chicken, but never anything as elaborate as what follows. More than a bit over-the-top for my taste, but interesting to read about. From Great Britain, inspired by an old Tudor tradition:
...TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall [created] a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago.
He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock - producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish.
But now his effort, inspired by recipes dating from Tudor times, has been dwarfed by a behemoth containing no fewer than 48 birds of 12 different species.
This massive roast, the proud creation of Devon farmer Anne Petch, weighs almost four stone (more than most airlines' baggage allowance), costs £665, and has enough meat to serve 125 people.
It contains about 50,000 calories and takes more than eight hours to cook in an industrialducksized oven.
Anne, who runs the Heal Farm shop near Kings Nympton, said: "The True Love Roast has a bird for each of the 12 days of Christmas.
"It uses skinless breast meat from several birds of each species with flavours that work well together."
The roast contains turkey, goose, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon squab, Aylesbury duck, Barbary duck, poussin, guinea fowl, mallard-and quail with herb and fruit stuffings.
Anne added: "It takes about 45 minutes to build the roast. However, it takes at least three hours before that to bone the birds and another couple of days to make all the stuffings.
"We've been making smaller multibird roasts for a while, but I wanted something with a real wow factor.
"It was only when I was halfway through the first prototype that I realised what a crazy idea it was. But I still think that next year we'll have something even more spectacular, perhaps a 21-bird roast.
This song has been called the "theme song of the struggle against disengagement." More information about it can be found here. After watching this video, I'm thinking Mr. Shurin probably lived in California in a past life:
Am-I-Dumb.com - Dumb?
A surprising video of EuroNews reporting on the daily rocketing of Sderot and the effects on its citizens. I don't think I've ever seen such unbiased coverage coming out of Europe. Must see.
A new blog, Interrupting Gelastic Jew, where I read an intriguing quote:
If you reward cruelty with kindness, with what do you reward kindness? Hillel
There's no monopoly on human goodness. The pieces are thrown into the box, shaken, and fall out differently in this story:
A Brooklyn man whose "Happy Hanukkah" greeting landed him in the hospital said he was saved from a gang of Jew-bashing goons aboard a packed Q train by a total stranger - a modest Muslim from Bangladesh.
Walter Adler was touched that Hassan Askari jumped to his aid while a group of thugs allegedly pummeled and taunted him and his three friends. So Adler has invited his new friend over to celebrate the Festival of Lights.
The two new pals - Adler, 23, with a broken nose and a fat lip, and Askari, 20, with two black eyes - broke bread together and laughed off the bruises the night after the fisticuffs.
"A random Muslim guy jumped in and helped a Jewish guy on Hanukkah - that's a miracle," said Adler, an honors student at Hunter College.
"He's basically a hero. Hassan jumped in to help us."
But Askari, who is studying to be an accountant, shrugged off the praise.
"I just did what I had to do," he recalled. "My parents raised me that way."
...It all began when Adler, his girlfriend, Maria Parsheva, and two other pals boarded the subway at Canal Street bound for Brooklyn and someone in another group wished them "Merry Christmas."
Adler and his pal Angelica Krischanovich responded: "Happy Hanukkah."
Apparently, those were fighting words.
"They just came at us so fast. The first thing that came into my mind was, 'Yeah, this is going to be violent,' " said Parsheva, 20.
One of the group immediately hiked up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of Christ.
"He said, 'Happy Hanukkah, that's when the Jews killed Jesus,' " said Adler.
The group of about 14 men and women then allegedly began taunting Adler and his pals as "dirty Jews" and "Jew bitches."
Amid a huge scrum, Askari jumped in.
"I'm bleeding all over the place, there's lots of people, they're fighting with Hassan still, and I'm like, why isn't anyone else doing anything?" Adler said.
He pulled the emergency brake right before entering the DeKalb Avenue station.
Police came aboard and arrested 10 people, charging six with assault and four with unlawful assembly.
Just the way his parents raised him, Askari says. We should all have such good parents.
We sing Ma'oz Tzur every Chanukah on the first night.
Coming back later to add:
In the video above, Jackie Mason speaks about Jewish appreciation for America. Just wanted to add that I agree with every word of what he had to say.
On a related note, Bookworm has a must-read post that I've been meaning to link to. She wrote about a discussion she attended at a San Francisco synagogue. The speakers were well-known Jewish conservatives Dennis Prager, John Podhoretz, and Mona Charen. After the speakers gave their talks, Bookworm came up with a terrific question about dual loyalty to the US and Israel:
...At the end of the evening, I asked a question that got some very interesting answers. I didn’t go into the evening expecting to ask this question, by the way, but it seemed an appropriate question by evening’s end. You see, it was patently clear, both from the conversation at the front of the room, the periodic audience applause, and the audience questions, that people in that room were both fiercely supportive of Israel and deeply patriotic Americans. That love for and belief in two countries reminded me of a question that’s been thrown at me over the years (or, perhaps, it could be categorized more accurately as an accusation): “How can you support Israel and call yourself a loyal American?” So when Michael Medved went around the room with a microphone, I caught his eye, and quickly asked “For those people who claim that America’s and Israel’s interests are antithetical to each other, how do we justify or explain our loyalty to both?”
Read the responses of the speakers and the very interesting blog comments that follow.
No time for much commentary - I have to drive my mother to the eye doc this am. Sderot has received a daily barrage of kassams for who knows how long. The stress of never knowing where and when might hit must be horrendous. Civilians - non-combatants and children - deliberately targeted:
Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal responded to the barrage of rockets on his city Wednesday morning by announcing his resignation in a live prime-time interview on public Voice of Israel radio. "I don't want to be around when a rocket hits a kindergarten and kills 20 children," he said with great emotion. "I have been losing sleep over such a scenario for years."
The resignation was spurred on by the security cabinet's decision just beforehand not to carry out a major offensive in Gaza to halt the Kassam rockets fired by Hamas terrorists.
Voice of Israel quickly dialed Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai for his reaction to Moyal's dramatic announcement. Vilnai explained that Israel has fought and continues to fight against the terrorist threat from Gaza. "The army has greatly reduced the number of Kassams being fired from Gaza, though not enough," Vilnai said. Moyal, asked for his reaction to Vilnai's words, said, "I am no longer the mayor, so I need not respond."
Moyal has been the mayor of Sderot for just over nine years, and the city has been battered by an estimated 6,300 rockets over the past six years. The residents' ongoing suffering began when Sderot was first shelled with mortars by Arab terrorists from Gaza in April 2001, and the first Kassam rocket hit the city less than a year later.
A Sderot woman responded to Moyal's resignation by saying, "I congratulate him for his courage and for taking responsibility, and I hope that the nation's leaders will also take responsibility. If they don't know what to do, then let them give the reins over to those who do know how to give the proper response. Yesterday, we gave them a little blow [with a small-scale military offensive into Gaza - ed.], and they retaliated with a barrage of Kassams; we need to strike them so hard that they won't have the ability to retaliate against us."
"I call upon the Prime Minister," she continued, "to take responsibility for at least something in this country; he doesn't take responsibility for the Second Lebanon War, nor for education, nor for what is going on here on the border of Gaza."
Another woman said that Moyal should not resign: "If he quits, then why should we remain here in this city?"
And they have made some very convincing arguments in his favor.
...my favorite Chanukah song, Light One Candle by Peter, Paul and Mary. Love the lyrics. Love the music. Not fond of Peter Yarrow's hocking before the song begins, but he did write it and for that I applaud him:
...but apparently not enough. The DOW is down 225 pts as I post this:
I was a fan of both the Three Stooges and Mad Magazine when I was growing up.
*Should've said, "What kind of a girl was I, anyway?" Girlhood came and went a long time ago.
The national anthem of Israel vs the Palestinian Authority:
National Anthem of Israel:
While yet within the heart - inwardly
The soul of the Jew yearns,
And towards the vistas of the East-eastwards
An eye to Zion looks.
It is not yet lost, our hope,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free people in our land
In the land of Zion and Jerusalem,
To be a free people in our land
In the land of Zion and Jerusalem.National Anthem of Palestinian Authority:
My country, my country
My country, the land of my grand fathers
My country, my country
My country, my nation, the nation of eternity
With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my revenge
The longing of my blood to my land and home
I have climbed the mountains and fought the wars
I have conquered the impossible, and crossed the frontiers
My country, my country, the nation of eternity
With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the guns
And the determination of my nation in the land of struggle
Palestine is my home, Palestine is my fire, Palestine is my revenge and the land of eternal
My country, my country, the nation of eternity
I swear under the shade of the flag
To my land and nation, and the fire of pain
I will live as a guerrilla, I will go on as guerrilla,
I will expire as guerrilla until I will be back
My country, my country, the nation of eternity
From the MEI
Henia Karmel and Ilona Karmel were born to a distinguished Jewish family in Krakow. The family, now assimilated into the surrounding culture, came from a prominent line of scholars, poets, and rabbis. The girls were given a top education in standard government schools as well as a Hebrew gymnasium. They spoke Yiddish, Polish, and German, and they read Hebrew and the Western classics as well as contemporary Polish poets.
In 1943, when the sisters were 17 and 20 years old, they were sent to Nazi forced labor camps—first, Skarzysko-Kamienna and then HASAG-Buchenwald—where they wrote...poems, now translated into English...FatherlandBY ILONA KARMELPlease find me an ordinary place to live.Forgotten, barren, a piece of ground.Rocks, a desert, I don’t mindIf it can be my homeland.A simple fishing village.Or something tucked inside a mountain.Where nothing much grows and no one wants to go.Its citizens common, quiet peopleUnknown to the outside world.If they accept me as their guestAnd murmur, “Our house is your house always.”Then let this be my homeland.But first let them forgive me for my mistake.It has been a curse and a disgraceTo have dark eyes and speak a strange language.To be a Jew.But I will praise that country all my days.I will be good to it and workThere among its rocks.I will sing and my blood will warm such a place.Oh faraway country, still a fantasy to me,I will live for you and die on commandIf you will first forgive me for my raceAnd let me call you home . . . wherever you are.*********
...After the war, the sisters immigrated to the United States and continued to write. Henia Karmel is the author of two novels written in English including Marek and Lisa, and Ilona Karmel is also the author of two novels written in English including An Estate of Memory.
This song underwent a nice upgrade from the version that was floating around last year:
Hat Tip: Mark
A short film overview of Spielberg's collection of rare 20th century footage which gave me goosebumps.
An excellent edition of Haveil Havalim, the weekly carnival of posts relating to Jewish and Israeli issues, is now up at Random Thoughts. Many good links to posts on Chanukah and Annapolis. Don't miss it!
...remains as elusive as ever in the wake of the Annapolis talks:
Another Day, Another Palestinian Bombardment of Israel - Tobias Buck
The small Israeli town of Sderot is enveloping itself in a blanket of concrete. Schools and nurseries crouch below hulking canopies, dozens of bomb-shelters dot the urban landscape and e
