RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5821/features/not-ordinary-at-all/

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon dedicated this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Sunday January 27th, to rescuers of Nazi victims who were not famous heroes but little-known people living “ordinary” lives. Yet some of those little-known rescuers lived anything but ordinary lives, like the extraordinary Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn.

When Berta celebrated her 90th birthday in New York this summer, one guest—Meir Brand, a white-haired grandfather of eight—made the trip from Israel. Berta calls Meir her son. He is, but not in any ordinary sense.

In 1941 when she was 18, Berta’s family of five fled Poland and crossed the Carpathian Mountains into still-unoccupied Hungary, where Jews were being persecuted but not yet hunted down. One night the family was hiding, crowded together, in a sheep stall, when Berta’s father, fearing his children would be killed, cried, “For what did I bring you into the world?” From her father’s desperation Berta took the conviction that sustained her for the next five years: “Better to be killed than to hide!”

Berta made her way to Budapest in 1942, where she began working for the Zionist underground through the youth movement Dror Habonim. She assumed a Gentile identity and the name Bigota Ilona and wore a crucifix around her neck. She would meet in a park with other Dror Habonim members living as Gentiles to plan operations and exchange weapons.

Jewish parents in more dangerous places were then bribing Gentiles and using other means to smuggle their children into Budapest, where the Zionist underground had a list of the children’s names but often not their locations. The underground worked to find them, and any other Jewish children they could discover, and get them to safety. An indirect participant in many of their operations was Rudolf Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew, who was head of Hungary’s Zionist Aid and Rescue Committee. “I saw Kasztner in Budapest in 1943,” Berta remembered, but “we halutzim saw him only from afar. He knew we were Jews pretending to be Gentiles, and we knew not to talk to him because the Germans were watching him.”

http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/pimping-the-culture/

Here is a pithy note from Dr. John, an e-pal…..I could not agree more…rsk

“The screaming, warbling, belting, style of singing — so normal in ‘American Idol’ episodes and its ilk, horrendous, over-embellished, even up to disrespectful renditions of the national anthem, dances at the White House ( see below) etc — are a result of the current worship of the commercialized exaggerations of gospel-singing style of the African-American churches. There are many other features of adorations of barrio pop culture that have filtered into the major fashions and styles of art, music, literature, dress, language…Meanwhile, good jazz, classical and creative pop music, correct speech etc are given over to ever-dwindling cadres of devotees… Where are our teachers in guiding good taste and higher culture in practically all our schools? Why do they kowtow to the predilections of the lowest common denominator in such politically-correct abandon?…. They do their charges little long-term good with such well-intended tolerance or capitulation to the current, commercial hebonic saturations… We need — for so many reasons — a return to more classical standards of education, moral upbringing, and civic consciousness — for everyone’s benefit, but most of all for the poorer sections of the populace…”

The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture – it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.

Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products.
In its salient features, the Commander In Chief’s Ball resembles the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. There, some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country – in politics, journalism and entertainment – convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the people, whether the latter know it or not.

By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page – most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.

“Grammy and Academy Award winner” Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of “vocal wobble” a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, “Why be a musician, when you can be a success?” Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves.

“We all know Beyoncé can sing,” came the response from inaugural organizers to the rumors that the singing sensation lip-synched to “The Star Spangled Banner.” Beyoncé is another performer who distinguishes herself with an obscene bump-and-grind routine and a din of discordant, jarring yelps.