Tag Archives: #neveragain

As a Jew, I fear what is happening in Florida

“Have money set aside and have flesh on your bones.”

This was the advice given to a friend who grew up as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her parents instilled in her and her brother the need for hyper-vigilance in case the unthinkable happened again. The couple’s circle of friends, fellow survivors of Nazi Germany, expanded the advice to include a ready passport and a warm coat in which money and jewels were sewn into the lining.

Since 2015, I have been researching and writing stories about Holocaust victims as told by themselves or their children. Each story relives in me the sacrifice, the terror, and the strength shown by the targets of Hitler’s Final Solution. And it comes down to this: Although they comprised a mere 1.7% of the population of Europe when Hitler came to power in 1933, over six million men, women, and children were murdered for the crime of being Jewish.

Hitler’s campaign against the Jews didn’t start with guns and ghettos and gas ovens. It started in 1933 with words: slow building propaganda effort to denigrate Jews, their accomplishments, and achievements. Those words were reinforced with images: distorted drawings of Jews as controlling octopi, fat bankers, and Christ killers. Words and images morphed into book bans and book burning. These actions grew into increasingly more restrictive laws regarding where Jews could work, shop, seek medical attention, and live. By November 10 , 1938, Kristallnacht, “Night of the Broken Glass,” Jews had neither rights nor means to escape. Trapped, two-thirds of Europe’s Jewry were murdered by bullets, beatings, starvation, or the gas chamber.

Unfortunately, the lessons of the Holocaust has done little to end Jew hatred. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in Florida have doubled since 2020, with 269 incidents of assault, harassment, and vandalism reported. This rise has been seen across the United States and the world. In a recent interview with Steven Colbert, Stephen Spielberg commented, “Not since Germany in the ’30s have I witnessed antisemitism, no longer lurking but standing proud with hands on hips like Hitler and Mussolini — kind of daring us to defy it. I’ve never experienced this in my entire life. Especially in this country.”

On June 10, 2023, neo-Nazis had held a rally not far from the gates of Disney World, in which they waved posters with swastikas, Nazi flags, the Florida state flag and posters supporting Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. While other Florida leaders across party lines immediately stepped up to condemn the actions, DeSantis has yet to comment. As noted in an article in the 6/12/2023 Tallahassee Democrat, “While the governor has been quick to tout his pro-Israel support and legislation, his office has in the past been slower to weigh in on public antisemitic displays.”

Books and course work pertaining to the Holocaust have been caught up in Florida’s legislators fight against “woke” education. History of the Holocaust, an on-line course, and Modern Genocide were rejectedfor including topics on social justice and critical race theory. A third book was allowed after “politically charged language” was removed.

As a result of complaints from parents in Martin County, Florida, Jodi Picoult’s The Story Teller, a novel about a friendship between a former Nazi SS officer and the granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor, was taken off the district’s shelves for “sexually graphic scenes, including depictions of sexual assault by Nazi guards. Picoult, a bestselling author who saw 19 more of her books targeted by anti-woke advocates denounced the move. “Books bridge divides between people, said Picoult. “Book bans create them”

Florida’s current climate comes chillingly too close to what happened in Nazi Germany. Despite the fact that transgender people make up approximately 1% of the nation’s population, the Republican legislators in Tallahassee have passed bills restricting transgenders from using public bathroom, denying them gender affirming medical treatment and drugs, and limiting the rights of parents of transgender children. In response to Tallahassee’s attempts “to erase Black history and restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.” the NAACP justifiably issued a travel advisory to African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals

Since 2021, DeSantis and the Republican legislature have passed bills that, as reported in a 4/23/2023 Washington Post article, will give us an idea what “Make Florida America” would look like under a DeSantis presidency. Restrict third-party registration groups, which have long been in the forefront of signing up Black and other minority voters. Eliminate campus diversity programs. Prohibit state and local governments from making investments based on environmental, societal and governance (ESI) benchmarks. Ban abortions after six weeks, Expand “Don’t Say Gay” to include all grades (K-12) in public schools. Make it easier to sue news media for defamation and win. Make it harder to sue insurance companies. Allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons without permit or proof of training. Allow DeSantis to run for president without resigning the governorship and without having to disclose his travel records while campaigning around the country.

Florida residents have a choice. We can leave, finding a place—hopefully that does not require passport and a warm coat that conceals valuables—that is more accepting. Or we can stay and fight with our words and our images and our vote. Thomas Kennedy, a Florida activist, stated in a 6/27/2023 Miami Herald article that the current far-right climate may serve as a motivation for change. “If we don’t at least check these….far-right figures that are starting to create a laboratory for extremist policies in Florida,” said Kennedy, “the Florida of today could become the America of tomorrow.” Remember this as we celebrate our country’s birth and look ahead to our country’s future.

https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Antisemitic-imagery-May-2020.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/03/steven-spielberg-says-antisemitism-today-is-standing-proud-with-hands-on-hips-like-hitler

https://itstartedwithwords.org/resources/antisemitism/timeline-of-antisemitism/

Bestselling writer Jodi Picoult denounces Florida book ban

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article276707966.html

.https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2023/06/12/nazi-flags-at-disney-how-has-ron-desantis-addressed-antisemitism/70312857007/
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/jodi-picoult-holocaust-novel-banned-from-school-in-inappropriate-books-row-5ciENrdr4HmK7DDw21I4ku

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/16/ron-desantis-florida-proposals

First published in the Capital Region’s Jewish World, a bi-weekly publication.

As hate crimes against Jews continue to rise, President Biden among others who are speaking out.

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A shorter version of this story was published in the Orlando Sentinel on January 8, 2023. This is the full article as published in The Jewish World in its January 5 issue.

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

On December 19, 2022, President Joe Biden used the White House’s Chanukah celebration to call out the rising anti-Semitism in the United States. “Silence is complicity,” he stated. Biden joined Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and other notable Jews in lighting the first ever official White House hanukkiah, which was created by the Executive Residence Carpentry Shop out of wood removed from the building in 1950 during a Truman-era renovation “Today, we must all say clearly and forcefully that anti-Semitism and all forms of hate and violence in this country have no safe harbor in America. Period,” Biden said.

This theme echoed the president’s tweet earlier in December. The remarks came one day after Ye, the rapper, formerly known as Kanye West, announced “I like Hitler” during an anti-Semitic rant on right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars show and five days after Donald Trump dined with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. “The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure,” stated Biden. “And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting anti-Semitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.” Trump, meanwhile, has yet apologize or to condemn the men he dined with at Mar-a-Lago. He has hidden behind an excuse of innocence, claiming he didn’t know who Fuentes was.

Condemnation

Some Republican leaders were swift of their condemnation of Trump’s actions. “Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” stated former Vice President Michael Pence. “And I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed Pence’s words. “There is no room in the Republican Party for anti-Semitism or white supremacy,” he said. “[A]nyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced Fuentes, stating that the white supremacist “has no place in this Republican Party,” but follow-up statement which supported Trump was blatantly untrue. “I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn’t know who he was.” According to CNN and other reputable news sources, Trump claimed four times that he didn’t know Fuentes but never denounced him or his views.

While condemning anti-Semitism, many other Republicans who spoke out condemned the ideology but avoided invoking the former president’s name. As a matter of fact, when PBS reached out to 57 Republican lawmakers to condemn the meeting, two-thirds never responded. Many, like McCarthy, have put the blame on Ye and Fuentes for showing up.

The silence is also deafening in my own state of Florida .In January, a small band of white supremacists converged in Orlando, where they chanted “White power!” and roughed up a Jewish student. Governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary suggested on Twitter that the white supremacists were actually “Democrats pretending to be Nazis.”The governor himself is yet to speak about the Trump/Ye/Fuentes debacle.

In March 29, 2022, article in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait opined that DeSantis’ silence may be rooted in his own strategy to obtain the 2024 Republican nod for the presidential candidate. Chait went soon to say that it may be even more deeply rooted in what Chait called the Republican presidential candidate hopeful’s “unembarrassed courtship of right-wing extremists.”

Look Who Is Talking?

So who is speaking up? Certainly the Anti-Defamation League, whose response was immediate and unequivocal. “Former President Trump’s dinner with anti-Semites Ye and Nick Fuentes underscores the ugly normalization of extremist beliefs — including anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of bigotry,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, its National Director and CEO. He went on to warn that the dinner further emboldened extremists.

And thankfully, many others have refused to be silent. Government officials, religious leaders, journalists, athletes, entertainers, and many others have raised their voices against anti-Semitism.

In November, over 200 leaders of the entertainment industry, including Mila Kunis, Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik, released a letter through the non-profit entertainment industry organization Creative Community for Peace urging Amazon and Barnes and Noble to stop its sale of the highly inflammatory book and film, Hebrews to Negros: Wake Up Black America. “At a time in America where there are more per capita hate crimes against Jews than any other minority, overwhelmingly more religious-based hate crimes against the Jewish people than any other religion, and more hate crimes against the Jewish people in New York than any other minority, where a majority of American Jews live,” the letter reads, “it is unacceptable to allow this type of hate to foment on your platforms.”

Survivors

There is another powerful but diminishing group that continues to bring the reality of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to the forefront: Holocaust survivors. January 27, 2023, marks the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Most of the survivors are in their eighties and beyond; the oldest known survivor, Yisrael Kristal, died at 113 in 2017. Through the efforts of Steven Spielberg , the Shoah Visual History Foundation has recorded over 55,000 stories Holocaust survivors in more than 50 countries and more than 30 languages. Events such as the International March for the Living and venues such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and other Holocaust museums across the country and world also bear witness.

“There are very few survivors left, and I want the world to know that there was a Holocaust,” Estelle Nadel, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who has talked to hundreds of groups for over forty years stated. “There’s so much denial, that every time I get a chance to tell my story, I feel like I’m doing something against it.”“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. President Biden knows this, as should all who wish to push back agains hate.

Sources

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/biden-condemns-antisemitism-after-ye-praises-hitler-post-trump-dinner.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/politics/fact-check-mccarthy-trump-fuentes/index.html

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ron-desantis-trumpism.html

(https://www.npr.org/2022/11/29/1139742844/republicans-denounce-trump-dinner-white-supremacist-nick-fuentes).

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/biden-condemns-antisemitism-after-ye-praises-hitler-post-trump-dinner.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/politics/fact-check-mccarthy-trump-fuentes/index.html

First published in the (Capital Region, New York) Jewish World, January 5, 2023.

A Lie of Omission: Mandy Patinkin

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I want my gravestone to read, ‘I tried to connect,’” Mandy Patinkin said

in a phone interview with me on January 6, 2023. This talented singer,

actor—and mensch!—brought his beautiful voice and compelling stories

to his 2023 eleven-city concert tour, Mandy Patinkin in Concert: Being Alive

with Adam Ben-David on Piano.

The show featured Patinkin’s favorite Broadway and classic American

tunes, including selections from Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim,

and Harry Chapin. He had fun and wanted his audience to have fun as well.

“We are alive. Tell people to come, to have fun, to enjoy,” he shared. “And if

you don’t enjoy, eat a sandwich!”

While the Tony and Emmy award winner stressed that Being Alive cele-

brated the joy of life, he also expressed his lifelong concerns about truthfulness,

righting wrongs, maintaining the memory of grief, and learning from his own

experiences to do the right thing for the oppressed and refugees today.

Patinkin is known for his many Broadway, television, and film credits,

including Evita, Sunday in the Park with George, The Secret Garden, Chicago

Hope, and Criminal Minds. Patinkin is also known for imbuing his characters

with a Yiddish neshama (a Jewish soul). This gevalt (force) can be seen in his

iconic role in The Princess Bride (“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You

killed my father. Be prepared to die!”); Avigdor, Barbra Streisand’s unrequited

love interest in Yentl; and Saul Berenson, the CIA operative in Homeland. In

Homeland, Berenson’s desk held a framed picture of the Talmudic dictum,

“Whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved an entire world.”

Patinkin sings in Yiddish, often in concert, and on one of his many albums,

Mamaloshen. An audience favorite is his Yiddish rendition of “Somewhere

Over the Rainbow.”

Mandel Bruce Patinkin was born in Chicago in 1952 to Doris and Lester

Patinkin. His parents raised him and his sister Marsha in a loving conservative

269Remembrance and Legacy

Jewish family. Patinkin attended both Hebrew and Sunday school, sang with

his synagogue’s choir, and attended Jewish summer camp. After attending the

University of Kansas and Juilliard, he found employment and then success on

the New York City stage.

When he was eighteen, his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Doris and Marsha insisted that Lester not be told. Patinkin went along with

telling the dying man that he had hepatitis, a lie he regrets. “My father was a smart

man. He knew what was happening,” said Patinkin. As a result, many important

conversations did not occur before his death in 1972 at fifty-five years old.

Many years later, Patinkin channeled his loss into his role in The Princess

Bride. As his character slays the nemesis who had killed his father, the grief

of his own father’s death spilled out in the lines, “I want my father back, you

son of a bitch!”

In 2021, Patinkin encountered another family secret. While he felt a

connection to the Holocaust—“it was in my DNA,” Patinkin said in his inter-

view—he never knew of any family members that perished. In an episode of

PBS’ Finding Your Roots, host Henry Louis Gates revealed to Patinkin that in

November 1942, the Germans and their collaborators rounded up the entire

Jewish population of Brańsk, Poland, including twenty members of Patinkin’s

grandfather’s family. They were packed into trains, deported to Treblinka, and

immediately murdered in the concentration camp’s gas chambers. Patinkin,

devastated by the news, broke down during the filming. “I was never given this

information,” he sobbed. “I don’t have words.” It took him a while to compose

himself enough to complete the taping.

Patinkin is still wondering why his family never shared this terrible chapter

in their past. “Lies are nothing new until they hit you in the kishkes,” he said,

and the lies hit him hard. He reflects on how this “lie of omission” deprived

those who were murdered of having their stories told.

He said that this episode heightened his need for truth. “Much of what is

happening in this world is based in lies, and we can fight those lies by listening,

270A Lie of Omission: Mandy Patinkin

by connecting, and by showing kindness.” Those three principles shape his life

not only as a Jew but as a self-proclaimed “humanitician,” a person who cares

about all humankind and fights against any form of bigotry and hatred.

Though he knows little about the relatives he lost, Patinkin has shared

the stories of other Jews who lived under the shadow of fascism. Since 2022,

Patinkin has narrated a series of podcasts produced in collaboration with

the Leo Baeck Institute. The episodes share accounts that range from Albert

Einstein to an unknown hero, Florence Mendheim, a Jewish librarian who

spied on Nazis in New York City.

As a second-generation descendant of Russian Polish, immigrants, he feels

deep rachmones (compassion) for those who have fled their own countries to

escape persecution. Patinkin is thankful to those who let his ancestors into

the United States and works to make sure others can do the same. “The wheel

is always turning,” said Patinkin. “We must help everyone as we can be top of

the wheel one day and bottom of the wheel the next.”

A longtime social activist, Patinkin supports multiple social justice orga-

nizations. He has worked for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an

organization that highlights the plight of refugees worldwide. He and his wife

Kathryn have traveled with IRC to Greece, Jordan, Uganda, Afghanistan, and

Serbia, and Phoenix, Arizona and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

With IRC and Exile, he honors the Jews who fled for their lives during

the Holocaust and sheds light on those escaping from similarly oppressive

regimes in the present day. Patinkin noted that, as antisemitism is raising its

ugly head, it is a good time in history for everyone to listen with kindness and

to share the refugees’ stories with others.

Originally published January 19, 2023.

Photograph of Mandy Patinkin

used with permission from Catherine Major, C Major Marketing.

Provided by Joan Marcus via Bond Group. https://www.

joanmarcusphotography.com.Mandy Patinkin

We cannot stand silent in the face of anti-Semitism

Praying with my feet and typing with my fingers

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I realized I never published this article, which I wrote in January 2020. Hope you enjoy it!!

I do believe we woke up the Children. You think the Flower Children of the 1960s were revolutionary? Just wait! Facebook Meme

Full confession. Outside of wearing bell bottom pants and trying marijuana once, I was NOT a flower child. My first vote for a president was in 1972, and I voted for Nixon. When fellow friends and professors marched against the Vietnam War after Kent State, I joined in. But during that entire day, I was more scared than passionate. Looking back, I wish I had done more. Been more. But it was not who I was at the time.

I wasn’t much of an activist in the following years. Despite my friends’s urging, I didn’t support the Equal Rights Amendment. I laughed it off with a popular excuse at the time: I LIKE men holding doors open for me. And I decided that Nixon was guilty later than most of my friends, not believing that the president of our country could be involved in such a cover-up.

I still am not an organizer or a marcher. I attended Women’s March in Orlando, armed with great signs and more passion. When one of the speakers began lambasting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, however, I vowed never to go to another event held by that group. I have passed up other opportunities for public protests, including those organized to support immigrants and decry gun violence.

That is why I am so in awe of the recent rise of our youth, specifically the March For Our Lives organizers and Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Greta Thunberg.

Parkland, Florida, the sight of the Margaret Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School shootings, is less than 200 miles from us. Like the rest of the country, I followed the news with fear and anger. Would this be another instance where victims and survivors were offered “thoughts and prayers” but no change in the lax gun laws that precipitated this event? Would anyone stand up to the National Rifle Association and the many politicians who not only accepted their money but also bowed to their demands?

The answer was a resounding YES. The leaders of the grassroots movement were not adults, but MSD students who survived the shooting that killed 18 people, including the friends of the organizers. Their reaction was immediate. David Hogg, a senior and the news director for the school’s news station, channeled his fury while in lockdown by taking notes and interviewing fellow students huddled around him. Less than ten hours later, he handed his footage to Laura Ingram on her prime-time Fox news show. Bristling at Ingram’s platitudinous,( “Our emotions are with you,”) anger spilled out. “I don’t want this to be another mass shooting….something that people forget.” And in the what would be the first call to action, Hogg stated the need” to go your congressmen.”

On March 24, 2018, less than seven weeks after the shooting, March for Our Lives (MFOL), a student-led demonstration in support of legislation to prevent gun violence in the United States took place in Washington, DC, with over 880 sibling events throughout the United States and the world. Turn out was estimated to be between 1.2 and .2 million, making it one of the largest protests in American history.

While MFOL were organizing against gun violence in the United States, a fifteen-year-girl in Sweden was watching and wondering if she could possibly do the same to save the planet. Greta Thunberg was eleven years old when her primary-school teacher showed a video on the effects of a warming world. That event, initially causing her an “endless sadness,” inspired her to start a one-girl campaign to pressure the Swedish government to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

On August 20, 2018, Thunberg settled in a spot across the street of the Swedish parliament building. She was armed with a sign that read “Student Strike for the climate” and a flyer that explained her purpose. It included the admonition: “Since you adults don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either”

She sat alone on Day One. But a person joined her on Day Two, and a few others on Day Three and so on. By September she had enough support to limit her strike, which she named Friday’s for Future, to one day a week. By the end of the year, she had been joined by tens of thousands of students across Europe. By fall 2019, Thunberg had been joined by millions across the world.

In her speech in front of the UN General Assembly in September 2019, Thunberg, like David Hoggs before her, expressed her anger and disgust. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,”she stated. “How dare you!” Her wish to follow in the footsteps of the activists from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School had been realized.

In this past year, what Time called “the power of youth” protests spread to include in Hong Kong, Iraq, and Lebanon. And November elections in Virginia, in which Democrats took control of both houses, was propelled by a “younger, more diverse and more liberal” Democrat base that supported gun control, women’s rights and clean energy.

“Adults didn’t take care of these problems, said Jaclyn Cronin, the chief organizer of Washington DC event,“so we have to take care of them.”

As an adult who feels strongly in the need for Tikkun Olam, leaving the world a better place, I believe that the battles for which the youth are fighting should also be taken up by all of us. Maybe it is time for those who were flower children—or flower children fails—need to get on board. Abraham Joshua Heschel, reflecting on his participation in the twentieth century civil rights movement, stated, “When I marched in Selma my feet were praying.”

I am no longer he young girl who stood on the sidelines. Like many of today’s youth, I am passionate about issues that impact all of us: Gun violence. Climate Change. Immigration policies. Women’s rights. As we head to the November 3, 2020, elections, I will be calling my legislators, writing my columns and letters to the editors, and joining people of all ages toto effect change. And who knows? Maybe, like Greta and Dave and Jaclyn and Rabbi Heschel, I will start praying with my feet.

The youth have taken the lead. It is our responsibility to them to follow.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.

Sources:

Alter, Charlotte et. al. “The Conscience.” Time Magazine. December 23/30, 2019.

Cullen, Dave. Parkland: The Birth of a Movement. Harper, 2019.

Palmer, Joanne. “Praying with Their Feet.” https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/praying-with-their-feet/. September 3, 2015.

Scheider, Gregory and Laura Vozzella. Democrats flip Virginia Senate and House, taking control of state government for the first time in a generation.https://www.washingtonpost.com/polls-open-in-virginia-balance-of-power-in-state-government-is-at-stake/2019/11/05/bdb57972-ff5b-11e9-8501-2a7123a38c58_story.html

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There Goes My Heart

The stories on "There Goes My Heart " capture special moments in a lifetime spent in Upstate New York, Florida, Colorado, and beyond.