RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-synagogues-anti-semitism-tax-hate-crime-shooter-shooting-attack-bigotry-judaism-security-11652992632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

“Yet when I reviewed the budgets of mainline Protestant churches in my own community, I found no security line items remotely on par with those in my synagogue. Maybe we are more fearful because of our history, but the Jewish community has been the greatest target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. since official reporting started more than a quarter-century ago. The numbers have risen in recent years.”

For the most part, serving on my synagogue’s board of trustees hasn’t involved dramatic decisions. Usually we discuss routine matters such as how to pay for repairs on the house we provide our rabbi. During the pandemic, we debated whether to open the preschool or refund parents’ payments. But over the past several years a more worrisome matter has appeared on our agenda. I call it the anti-Semitism tax.

More than 5% of our budget is now devoted to security to protect the congregation. That’s more than $150,000 a year to prevent tragedies like the deadly attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 or the hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, in January. We had long used funds to hire off-duty cops for the High Holidays to direct traffic, but this is much more serious.

Every Jewish congregation is, as they say in accounting, a tub on its own bottom. There’s no diocese or sanhedrin to provide financial support. Membership dues keep the lights on. Security spending comes at the expense of other budget items: building repairs, new books for the library, or lower tuition for preschool parents, a key source of the new members we need to thrive as a community of believers. Ours is a reasonably well-off congregation, but those that aren’t face hard choices.

“Congregations have had to invest both in physical infrastructure and ongoing security personnel and processes,” observes Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, who heads the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. “Synagogues would obviously rather spend on our core functions of study, worship, volunteerism and community building.”

https://whiterosemagazine.com/how-did-we-get-here/

Lots of Jews seem to be paying attention to Jewish life in America in a new way now. Rashida Tlaib, “Apartheid Week” on college campuses, social media influencers, Colleyville, and much more have come together in critical mass and shoved these “twice-a-year Jews” into the figurative Jewish communal room, many for the first time. They are stumbling around, wondering how we got here and what to do next. “I can’t believe this is happening here, in the United States,” they say in disbelief. 

But, actually, it isn’t at all hard to believe. After all, “this” has been happening here for a while. “This” has also happened in almost every Diaspora Jewish community throughout history. If by “this” they mean the scapegoating of Jews during turbulent times, and the subsequent increase in anti-Semitic activity, then “this” is neither new nor surprising. In fact, it is perfectly predictable.  

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside. BDS, the Squad, attacks on Hassidic Jews in the streets, BLM’s charter, Pinkwashing, Deadly Exchange, leadership at the Women’s March, biased mainstream media coverage of Israel, anti-Semitic professors at elite private high schools, Islamist apologists: it has all felt like a sudden landslide. But, in fact, it has been more like a slow, creeping mudslide that they seem to have entirely missed, until it appeared as a daily feature on their social media feeds. Why do American Jews seem so caught off guard?

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside.

One explanation is historical ignorance. It’s usually a bad blind spot. If you didn’t study Soviet Jewry, perhaps it is difficult to understand that political collectivism is bad for the Jews. If you didn’t learn about the implications of group “identity politics” in 19th and 20th century Europe, you might not appreciate that the contemporary American manifestation of it is a threat to the Jewish community and Israel. If you don’t know that the image of the money-hungry, usurious Jew is an anti-Semitic slur hundreds of years old, then when Ilhan Omar says, “it’s all about the Benjamins” you might think the comment was an offensive, one-off remark you can overlook. These trends have been building for some time, but if you didn’t have historical sensitivity to them, you wouldn’t guess that the politics you support are also hurting Jews. Then, when your favorite ice cream brand suddenly decides to boycott Israel, it comes as a shock.

https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-jewish-community-cannot-survive-perfidy-by-its-leadership/

This is not the country we grew up in. The Jewish community is under siege. According to the FBI, Jews are the primary targets of hate crimes in America. An analysis of their reports reveals that a Jew is twice as likely to be a victim of a hate crime as a black person or a Muslim, ten times more likely than an Asian or a Latino, and twenty times more likely than a non-Hispanic white.

Jews are being beaten in the streets of New York City, murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Jersey City, stabbed in Boston, taken hostage in Texas, and harassed and bullied on college campuses across the country. In more than a few places, Jews live with rising anxiety. Most Jewish community buildings require security. Israel, the Jewish state, is defamed and demonized by the mainstream media, and maligned in both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, as anti-Zionism becomes the new anti-Semitism. 

Hostility toward American Jews continues to grow. In February 2022, police in New York reported that anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city were up 409 percent. A recent American Jewish Committee (AJC) poll found that four in ten Jews avoid making themselves identifiable as Jews, avoid going to Jewish events, or refrain from posting Jewish-related content online. Ninety percent of Jews think anti-Semitism is a problem in America.  

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps. Lethal white nationalists attack them in the name of white supremacy, blaming them for supporting multiculturalism and rising Third World immigration. Radical black nationalists—including Farrakhan-following celebrities, academics, and politicians—attack Jews in the name of black liberation and “equity.” Radical progressives and segments of the Democratic Party promote the genocidal BDS movement and anti-Jewish critical race theory, inciting an ideological assault on Israel and Jews in the name of “social justice” and Palestinian nationalism. This new assault is a kind of “virtuous Jew-hatred,” socially acceptable and even fashionable, not easily countered by facts, logic, or reason.

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/untrained-passenger-lands-airplane-11652285057?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Whenever disaster strikes and life’s great challenges arise, we all hope to be ready to rise to the occasion. But it seems unreasonable even to hope for the achievement of a rookie aviator on Tuesday.

WPBF, an ABC television affiliate in Florida, is covering perhaps the most inspiring story of the year. The station’s Ari Hait reports from West Palm Beach:

A passenger with no flight experience safely landed a private plane at Palm Beach International Airport Tuesday afternoon after the pilot suffered a medical emergency.
“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the passenger can be heard telling Air Traffic Control in Fort Pierce. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”
“Roger. What’s your position?” Air Traffic Control responded.
“I have no idea,” the passenger said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
“Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either north or southbound,” Air Traffic Control told him. “We’re trying to locate you.”

-https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220307-janet-sobel-the-woman-written-out-

In 1938, a Ukrainian-born grandmother created one of art’s biggest shocks – but it was attributed to the US painter Jackson Pollock. For International Women’s Day, Kelly Grovier explores the influence of Janet Sobel.

This is the way the story has always been told: in 1947, Jackson Pollock, the pioneering American painter whose rugged name rhymes with the verve of his virile persona, finally lost patience with the fussy finesse of careful brushstrokes that had defined art history. Chucking his bristles and easel aside, he grabbed some sticks and started flinging paint directly on a canvas he’d stretched out on the floor. With a flick of his wrist while galloping around the work like a ranch hand roping a rampant calf – not so much painting a passive image as lassoing an untamable one – Pollock had hit upon a fresh new mode of energetic artistic expression, one with muscle and swagger befitting the wild west of his Wyomingite birth and the wide, dry lightning plains of his unbridled psyche.

“During the summer of 1947,” Camille Paglia writes in her excellent survey of milestones in the history of image-making, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, “there was a major breakthrough: he invented his signature ‘drip’ style, which would transform contemporary art.” Pollock’s was an instinctive, shoot-from-the-hip technique that didn’t painstakingly plot its next move – rather, one that grabs a bottle, takes a swig, wipes its lips on its cracked knuckles, and couldn’t care less who’s watching. This is painting free from form and formalities, the kind of painting that only an American, a real American, could invent.

RESUMING ON FRIDAY MARCH 11

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/world/middleeast/israel-omicron-surgeon.html

Elad Maor initially feared that he might have exposed hundreds of people to the virus when he became the first Israeli to test positive for the new Omicron variant on Saturday morning.

In the three days before his positive results, Dr. Maor, a cardiologist, had attended a large staff meeting at his hospital east of Tel Aviv. He had inserted stents into the arteries of 10 patients. And he had driven to a cardiology conference north of Tel Aviv, sharing the 90-minute car journey with a 70-year-old colleague, and lunched there with five others in a crowded canteen.

Dr. Maor, 45, had attended a piano recital with dozens in the audience, where his 13-year-old played a short piece by Stephen Heller, a Hungarian composer. And finally, last Friday night, Dr. Maor had eaten sea bass at the home of his in-laws, together with his wife and nine other family members.

But of these many people, most of whom had received three shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, only his 70-year-old colleague has so far tested positive for the Omicron variant in the five days since.

That number may yet rise, as the virus can take several days to show up in tests, and not every contact has been tested. But at least 50 people have already been screened with a P.C.R. test by Dr. Maor’s hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, and at least 10 of those have been tested at least three times.