RUTHFULLY YOURS

Percy Barnett (1859-1941), for example, who had the early misfortune to be placed in London’s Jewish Orphanage, was such a brilliant pupil there that he won a place at the City of London School and then went up to Trinity College, Oxford, winning a valuable scholarship despite competition from 40 upper-class boys from England’s great public schools. He became an influential educator and author.

Paul Goldberg (c1897-1961), born into grinding poverty in London’s East Ham, managed by application and ability to become a top civil servant in one of the Whitehall ministries.

The Billig siblings, Levi (1897-1936) and Hannah (1901-87), the children of Russian refugee parents in Whitechapel, became, respectively, a scholar of Semitic languages (he was cold-bloodedly murdered by an Arab during the troubles in Jerusalem in 1936) and a much-loved physician in the East End who was the heroine of an air raid on Wapping in 1941 when she treated the wounded despite being injured herself (she ultimately made aliya).

Selig Brodetsky (1888-1954), fled a pogrom in his native Ukraine with his parents and many siblings in 1893, settling in the East End.  A brilliant pupil, he won a mathematics scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1908, to the immense pride of East End Jewry, he was bracketed senior wrangler.  He went on to hold the chair of mathematics at Leeds University, and served as president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I could go on …

Such individuals, who overcame poverty and antisemitism to attain their desserts, were born into families in which book-learning was prized and academic achievement revered, both for their own sake and because they were the key to a fulfilling life and to upward mobility.

Alas.  In certain milieus today, doing well at school is equated with being nerdy, uncool, sissy, and automatically invites bullying …  It was noticeable that in the recent riots no bookshops were targetted, no kindles among the must-have items sought by the plundering mobs.

There are no responsible or respectable male role models in countless families on “sink estates”; teenage pregnancy succeeds teenage pregnancy, and the entire cycle of single mother, absent father, alienated gang-prone child repeats itself over and over and over again.

A gang of looters, hooded and masked for their “exclusive” television interview, and by no means unintelligent youngsters, told Sky TV that they have no remorse for what they’d done – one, aged 16, declared:

“Everything we wanted we could get…I done this basically to provide for my family. I got some stuff for my son and I got some stuff for me, like some clothes, trainers.”

When asked whether he regretted his actions he replied:

“No because I’m watching my plasma that I just got. It feels like Christmas came early, ya know?”  Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/08/12/london-riots-teen-dad-brags-he-got-the-whole-johnson-johnson-set-looting-for-his-baby-son-115875-23339118/