JustASC

I shared a flight with the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday (in the sense that I saw him in first class as I made the Walk of Shame back to coach). Interesting challenge to explain who he is to the kids. How do you capture his long tabloidy journey from court jester of the civil righs movement, to racial and religous provocateur, to perennial presidential candidate, to the kind of nearly dignified (and thin — say what you want, but the man sticks to a diet!)  elder statesman he’s grown into? I mean, what would you even say he does for a living?

For a lot Jews, it isn’t hard to sum up his career in one word: “anti-Semite.”  I don’t go there — even in his most egregious race-baiting, like the Freddie Fashion Mart protests and his Crown Heights incitements, I always felt he was more interested in exploiting N.Y.’s ethnic and class divides than in singling out Jews for ridicule. In both of those incidents, Sharpton viewed Jews as examples of white privilege, and in his zero-sum thinking, the success of any one ethnic group must come at the expense of another. The tragedy of Sharpton and the civil rights faction he represented was that he channeled his community’s anger into blaming and scape-goating the other, instead of seeking changes from within, challenging society’s warped power imbalances through the courts and public persuasion, and cultivating allies without.

Sharpton’s involvement after a cop killed a 16-year-old black youth in Teaneck in 1990 was typical of the bankruptcy of his style of activism. In the wake of the tragedy a lot  of good folks in Teaneck, white and black, civilians and cops, reached out to build bridges. Sharpton, meanwhile, brought in his followers on buses, marching on the Municipal Building to demand — well, it’s not clear what, except some vague notion of “justice.” The futility of his approach was summed up by an onlooker, Kendal Brown, quoted in the Times account of one of the marches:  “I don’t know what this is going to accomplish.”

And then there is the Tawana Brawley incident, which was just unforgivable.

So who’s that guy in first class, kids? A civil rights “leader” who left things worse than he found them. Let’s hope he’s learned from his failures.

Glenn Beck’s ugly attacks on George Soros are being condemned by the ADL, Michelle Goldberg, and Jewish Funds for Justice (not online yet).

According to Beck, a young George Soros ”used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps.”

Except Soros was a 13-year-old Jew living in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive!

 Here is the account provided by Michael T. Kaufman in his 2002 biography, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire [via Simon Greer of Jewish Funds for Justice]:

This is what actually happened. Shortly after George went to live with Baumbach [the gentile hiding Soros], the man was assigned to take inventory on the vast estate of Mor Kornfeld, an extremely wealthy aristocrat of Jewish origin. The Kornfeld family had the wealth, wisdom and connections to be able to leave some of its belongings behind in exchange for permission to make their way to Lisbon. Baumbach was ordered to go to the Kornfeld estate and inventory the artworks, furnishings, and other property. Rather than leave his “godson” [Soros] behind in Budapest for three days, he took the boy with him. As Baumbach itemized the material, George walked around the grounds and spent time with Kornfeld’s staff. It was his first visit to such a mansion, and the first time he rode a horse. He collaborated with no one and he paid attention to what he understood to be his primary responsibility: making sure that no one doubted that he was Sandor Kiss. Among his practical concerns was to make sure that no one saw him pee.

In placing moral culpablility on the shoulders of a teenager hiding from the Nazis, Beck has done a shitty thing — shittier than his usual guilt-by-association, double-bank shot historical distortification.

Go into any JCC gym in the country and count how many of the TVs are showing Fox News. Because they’re, you know, pro-Israel. A shande.

Memo to U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ): If you are going to criticize the president for challenging Israel’s planned construction in Jerusalem, don’t start your press release by esentially making the president’s point.

From the release:

Washington, D.C. – Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr., Wednesday wrote a letter to President Obama regarding the president’s recent remarks about new Israeli housing plans for East Jerusalem which have caused an impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. [Italics added.]

For those who grew up in Jewish Newark, or share other memories with the now 77-year old Philip Roth, the impulse to match fact and fiction in the novelist’s work is hard to resist.

In his latest novel, Nemesis, Roth’s protagonist Bucky Cantor shares a nickname and an occupation with a real-life legend from the playgrounds of the famed Weequahic neighborhood, although Roth tells a local historian, “his every word and action is my invention.”

Our Bob Wiener has the exclusive here.

These guys show up every fall. Since my office window is a mirror from the outside, they don’t see us and assume they’re part of a larger flock. Dumb enough to eat.

JTA reports:

Former and current employees of the Claims Conference are among 17 people who have been charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York with participating in a $42.5 million fraud at the organization.

Not that investigators shouldn’t be praised for uncovering the exploitation of Holocaust survivors and desecration of the Shoa, but did anyone at the U.S. Attorney’s office think twice about announcing it on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, often considered the start of the Holocaust?

Jersey-raised Jew wins statewide seat:

With only the smallest notation of the fact, Republican Sam Olens broke through one of the oldest barriers in Georgia politics last week.

The man who will be our next attorney general is also the first Jewish candidate to win a statewide, partisan race in Georgia.

Apparently Olens’ religion was a factor in the campaign, but only one of many:

 “There were four things against me,” Olens said. Yes, he was Jewish. But he was also a Florida native raised in New Jersey. He wasn’t part of the state Capitol crowd whose networks usually produce statewide candidates. Plus, he was from metro Atlanta.

“I think it is clear the Atlanta card was by far a bigger issue for me than any of the others,” Olens said. “I think we should take great pride in this state, in how little my religion played a part in the campaign.”

There were incidents, of course.

“There were whisper campaigns — big-time in the primary. I would walk into rooms and people would overtly comment about my religion to me,” Olens said. “But I think the nice thing is the number of folks who did that was very, very few.”

Reference to his New Jersey upbringing became “a code word,” he said.

I didn’t have any luck finding out where in NJ Olens was raised. He doesn’t exactly trumpet the fact on his campaign web site.

UPDATE: A staffer for Olens, in response to my query, fills in his NJ biography:

Mr. Olens moved as a child to Vineland, N.J., from Miami with his father following the death of his mother to be closer to family. A few years later, his father died and he and his brother and sister were raised by his aunt there following the death of his uncle.

This feels sort of hopeful: The family of Rachel Corrie, suing Israel over the death of their activist daugher in a pro-Palestinian protest in 2003, say they do not consider themselves “anti-Israel”:

“I don’t see this as about Israel’s legitimacy,” [her sister Sarah Corrie Simpson] said in an interview. “My family is not anti-Israel. What Rachel saw when she went to Gaza was extremely troubling and because of what happened to her we are now connected to the Palestinian issue. But Israeli peace activists shared her concern and are helping us with our case. From our family’s perspective, this is about human rights for all people and holding governments accountable.”

Today is the 15th anniversary of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. J.J. Goldberg remembers in the Forward:

Time has a way of easing the pain of great loss. The pain loses its piercing edge, the loss fades into memory and there is healing. That’s not so in Rabin’s case. For those who believed in him and his path, at least, his loss was not merely personal. He embodied a hope for an Israel at peace with its neighbors, and a vision of how to get there through reconciliation and compromise. His assassin wanted to kill that hope and that vision, and he succeeded.

Make no mistake: Those who opposed Rabin’s vision overwhelmingly share the grief at his death. They’re often accused collectively of gloating at his downfall. This is unfair and hurtful. Except for a tiny minority, the right mourns him as a hero and laments the violence that cut him down, no less than the left. But the right’s grief is of a different sort. Time can heal it. The murder did not crush their vision. On the contrary.

Philip Roth’s slim, brooding new novel Nemesis is set in Newark in 1944, during a polio epidemic. The crippling, deadly disease — cause unknown, treatment inadequate to futile– is the nemesis in question, stalking the young people of Newark the way death follows the men and boys fighting overseas, the way terrorism stalks the innocent (and, as a letter writer in the Times Book Review suggests, the way genocide pursued the Jews of Europe).

But as Roth points out in an interview, there was no polio outbreak in Newark in 1944. Like Roth’s other alternative history, The Plot Against America, the new novel  

involves a working-class boy in love with both an upper-middle-class girl and the seeming safety of her family. Like the latter, it evokes a fictional disaster — there was no polio epidemic in Newark in 1944, any more than there was a Lindbergh presidency — as a cautionary measurement, an expression of how fortunate we were.

“I don’t know what causes me to want to imagine some hell that didn’t happen,” Roth says, his voice quietly expressive, “but I think in a way it’s a tribute to our luck.” 

But there was a polio epidemic in Newark — in 1916, as described in Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America, by Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut.

Twenty-six states reported 27,000 cases of polio with 6,000 deaths. Fewer than 2,000 Newark children contracted the infection. The primary victims were Russians, Poles, and Polish Jews “in the most congested part of the city,” according to the authors.

The fear captured in Roth’s novel was also very real: Guards were placed at quarantined homes, the libraries banned children, and the Harry Lukens Wild Animal Show was ordered out of town. A city fatwa against houseflies, thought to have been carriers of the disease, was imposed — a detail Roth borrows for his book.

“Only with the cold days of autumn did the epidemic abate,” write the Krauts.