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| 1 |
ID:
086877
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In December 2008, two weeks before Hamas abandoned the six-month lull in its rocket war against Israel, the founder and executive director of the new lobbying group J Street delivered a message via YouTube to potential supporters. Appearing in a crisply pressed pale blue button-down, Jeremy Ben-Ami offered a personalized explanation for why, eight months earlier, he had launched a self-described "pro-Israel, pro-peace" organization that hoped to change the way the United States government dealt with Israel. In an earnest, confessional style, Ben-Ami explained that in past years,
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| 2 |
ID:
086879
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
On February 9th, President Obama visited Elkhart, Indiana, the American community with the country's highest unemployment rate, 15.3 percent. (It had been only 4.7 percent the year before.) He was there to sell his stimulus bill, then moving through Congress and since signed. He noted that the bill would provide help for the workers who had lost their jobs and, more important, help them get their jobs back by reviving the economy.
The jobs that have vanished in Elkhart are predominantly in the recreational-vehicle industry, which is concentrated in the city of 52,000. With the severe recession the country is now experiencing, it is hardly surprising that this industry has been devastated. After all, an RV is expensive both to purchase and to operate and is hardly a necessity. But when the economy recovers, will those jobs come back as demand for RV's returns? Or, in the meantime, will new environmental regulations championed by Obama work to impede the sales of vehicles that get only a few miles to the gallon and thereby make job growth in Elkhart an impossibility?
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| 3 |
ID:
086883
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
When I was four, we went to Oahu. It was the first time we celebrated Passover away from home. My only memory of the trip is of the ride to the Los Angeles airport. Our neighbor, Mr. Janis, drove a taxi. He loaded up our luggage and we all crammed in: my father up front and my mother in back with my sister Rachel and me. Rachel was then just shy of a year old, as yet incapable of communicating distress in any manner other than a wail. She was wailing as Mr. Janis started the car. We had not yet pulled away from the curb when she vomited explosively across the faux leather seats. My father apologized. My mother ran back into the house for sponges and Lysol. Somehow we made our flight. I assume we had a good time, because we went back again the next year. What is clear in hindsight is that Rachel was trying to warn us.
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| 4 |
ID:
086876
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause? And just how to do it? No? Others have. Their answers have ranged from Cain's original "Abel, with my bare hands" to Hitler's "all the Jews, mainly by gas," and the widespread Hutu view in the Rwanda of 1994, "the Tutsis, with machetes." The question burns today for the government of Sudan and in the Congo.
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| 5 |
ID:
086880
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
If there is one man alive who has made me ashamed as a Catholic and an Englishman, it is Bishop Richard Williamson. This is the man who declared on Swedish television: "There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies." With his calumnies against the Jewish people, amplified by the Internet, he has reopened old wounds that had begun to heal and, in the eyes of many, has associated the Catholic Church with the vilest of all lies: Holocaust denial. How could so preposterous a personage come to obscure and temporarily even to overshadow nearly half a century of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation? Williamson belongs to the reactionary sect that calls itself the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). Its 400,000 members are better known as the Lefebvrists after their founder, the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who broke with the Catholic Church over the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The Lefebvrists are often described as "traditionalist Catholics," because they refuse to accept the vernacular Mass, which has been the ordinary form of Catholic worship since 1962, and insist on the older Latin liturgy known as the Tridentine Mass.
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| 6 |
ID:
086881
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Embarrassed! Who is Jacob Schiff to be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky?" This was the writer Calvin Trillin's tongue-in-cheek reaction to learning the means by which his Jewish immigrant family had come to settle in Missouri a hundred years ago. Not that Trillin was unhappy to have grown up in the American heartland. As he records in his 1996 memoir, Messages from My Father, his family had prospered there, as did most other participants in one of the more interesting episodes in American Jewish history-the Galveston Project. Underwritten by Jacob Schiff, the most prominent Jewish financier and philanthropist of his time, the Galveston Project was initiated in 1906 and brought to an end in 1914. It was judged a failure in its day and is now known only to a small number of specialists. But it was a unique experiment-"the only substantial example," as Bernard Marinbach notes in Ellis Island of the West (1983), "of organized Jewish immigration to the United States"-which brought thousands of Jewish families into the U.S. through Galveston, a Texas port city on the Gulf of Mexico. Looking back at this episode with the benefit of a century's hindsight offers some perspective on what it achieved and how Jews have since prospered in America.
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