Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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The new George Clooney film, "The Monuments Men," tells the thrilling story of U.S. military personnel who during World War II risked their lives to rescue paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Picasso, and Chagall that the Nazis had stolen. But for Connecticut civil rights attorney Bill Bingham, the story is one of tragic irony. His father, Hiram Bingham IV, was a dissident U.S. diplomat who helped rescue Marc Chagall after the Roosevelt administration abandoned the painter-the same...
For American Jews, the birthday of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an occasion to recall the impressive Jewish contributions to the movement for African-American civil rights-from Jewish Freedom Riders such as Schwerner and Goodman, to the rabbis who marched with Dr. King, to the Jewish attorneys who spearheaded the NAACP's legal battles against discrimination. It may surprise some to learn that one of the earliest Jewish protests against racism in America was lodged more than half...
Although Ariel Sharon will be remembered primarily for his achievements on the battlefield and his decisions as an Israeli political leader, an often-overlooked aspect of his legacy was his impact on the American Jewish community. In March 1980, Sharon arrived in the United States in the midst of an uproar over the Carter administration's support of a United Nations resolution branding Jerusalem "occupied Arab territory." Sharon, as a member of Prime Minister Menachem Begin's cabinet, was invite...
Actress Meryl Streep has reignited a debate that has simmered below the surface in Hollywood for decades: Was Walt Disney anti-Semitic? The occasion was the annual awards event of the National Board of Review, an organization of filmmakers, students, and movie scholars. Streep presented an award to Emma Thompson, for her role in the new movie "Saving Mr. Banks," about the making of Mary Poppins. Thompson co-stars as Poppins author P.L. Travers, alongside Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. Streep took...
“I could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in a 20th century civilization,” President Franklin Roosevelt declared in the wake of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht pogrom, which devastated the German Jewish community 75 years ago this month. Most Americans, like their president, were appalled to read of Nazi storm troopers burning down hundreds of synagogues, ransacking thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, murdering some one hundred Jews, and hauling 30,000 more off to concentration camps Nov. 9-10, 1938. In the days following the pogro...
A tried-and-true method for lobbyists whose cause is opposed by the U.S. president is to bypass the White House by going to Congress. It worked for Jewish activists in 1943. But will it work in the current battle over sanctions on Iran? Seventy years ago, the Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group found themselves stymied by an administration that did not want to take action to save Jewish refugees from the Nazis. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his aides insisted that rescue was not possible until the Nazis were...
Holocaust memoirs and eyewitness testimony record how Jews living under Nazi rule repeatedly took extraordinary risks to mark Yom Kippur in some way. Despite the grave dangers involved, and even though Jewish law permits eating or performing labor on the Day of Atonement in order to save one’s life, many Jews endured unimaginable suffering in order to commemorate the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. In his diary, Rabbi Shimon Huberband described his experiences in the Polish town of Piotrkow in the aftermath of the September 1939 German i...
As the final minutes of Rosh Hashanah ticked away, 13-year-old Leo Goldberger was hiding, along with his parents and three brothers, in the thick brush along the shore of Dragor, a small fishing village south of Copenhagen. The year was 1943, and the Goldbergers, like thousands of other Danish Jews, were desperately trying to escape an imminent Nazi roundup. “Finally, after what seemed like an excruciatingly long wait, we saw our signal offshore,” Goldberger later recalled. His family “strode straight into the ocean and waded through three...
Seventy years ago this month, on July 28, an eyewitness to the Nazi atrocities against Europe’s Jews brought the horrifying news directly to the most powerful man on earth. It was the moment that President Franklin D. Roosevelt came face to face with the Holocaust. By the time he was 26, Polish underground member Jan Karski had been imprisoned by the Soviets, tortured by the Gestapo, and nearly drowned while escaping from a hospital in German-occupied Slovakia. After all he suffered, it would h...
The name “Evian” will forever be remembered as the site of an international conference, 75 years ago last week, that was supposed to save the Jews of Germany—but instead sealed their doom. Evian, however, should also be remembered for its link to the rescue of a different group of refugees in the 1970s, the so-called “boat people” fleeing the Communist takeover of Southeast Asia. Now, perhaps Evian will go down in the history books for yet another reason—as a turning point in addressing the problem of the tens of thousands of African ref...
June 27 was Helen Keller Day—the annual occasion when students across America learn about the disabilities activist whose remarkable achievements inspired her generation, and every generation since. Less well known, but no less deserving of commemoration, was Keller’s powerful outcry against the Nazis. One of Adolf Hitler’s top priorities when he became chancellor of Germany in 1933 was to prevent schools from using books that the Nazis regarded as “degenerate.” Eighty years ago this spring, G...
The nomination of Samantha Power for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has drawn the Jewish community’s attention to her controversial 2002 remark about hypothetical U.S. action against Israel to protect Palestinians from genocide. But Power’s confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate is also likely to address a broader question: How can lawmakers judge her record on responding to genocide, when the government agency she has headed for the past year has no office, no staff, no phone number, and no public record of taking any action to...
The news that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) unfairly targeted conservative groups has brought renewed spotlight on a 2010 lawsuit filed by the pro-Israel group Z Street, which alleges it was also singled out by the IRS when applying for tax-exempt status. The Z Street case, whose first hearing is set for July 2 in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, has raised eyebrows in the Jewish community. But Z Street’s claims, if true, would not mark the first time the IRS has been used against Jewish activists. During the Holocaust e...
During his visit to China last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recalled that the city of Shanghai was “one of the few places that opened its gates” to Jews fleeing Hitler. Officials of the Chinese Communist government, standing nearby, beamed with pleasure at the expectation that people all over the world would read how their regime rescued Jews. But is it true? As the prime minister noted, the port city of Shanghai was a haven for many European Jewish refugees during the Hitler years, at a time when most other countries, inc...
When President Bill Clinton stepped to the podium at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., 20 years ago, most of the audience no doubt expected him to offer the usual generalities about the importance of not forgetting the past. Instead, Clinton went much further, delivering the harshest words ever uttered by an American president about our country’s response to the Nazi genocide. Clinton made clear that the response of the U.S. to news of the Holocaust was an important part of the events that need t...
A national anthem written more than 50 years before the birth of the state for which it was composed, “Hatikvah” has served as a source of hope and inspiration for Jews who have found themselves in the most dire of circumstances. During the darkest hours of the Holocaust, Jews defied their tormentors by singing the song’s powerful lyrics. Filip Muller was a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz—a Jewish slave laborer who was kept alive because he helped take corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria...
Passover at Irma Lindheim’s Long Island home in the 1920s was not your standard Jewish holiday experience. There was plenty of matzo ball soup and brisket, to be sure. But the dining room was occupied by a makeshift tent, the Passover table was replaced by a pile of sheepskin rugs, and the Lindheim children were dressed in Arab garb. For Mrs. Lindheim, the national president of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, from 1926 to 1928, Passover was an opportunity to make a dramatic sta...
