A Republican from Mississippi, Hiram Revels took office on February 25, 1870. He became the first Black senator a mere three weeks after Black men gained the right to vote with the 15th Amendment. During his time in office, Revels fought for Black Americans’ civil rights and education.
https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/herbert-hoov
Before serving as our 31st president (from 1929-1933), Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, served as the director of the U.S. Food Administration, and served as the third U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
When the United States entered World War I, President Wilson appointed Hoover, who became known as the country’s “food czar,” to lead the Food Administration. After the war, Hoover led the European Relief Council, which was charged with restoring Europe’s civilian economy and feeding the starving multitudes of Europe. Known as “the Great Humanitarian,” he is credited with saving literally millions of lives, including countless thousands in Jewish communities across Europe.
Hoover’s role administering European food relief brought him in contact with Europe’s Jews and sensitized him to their suffering from both severe economic distress and harsh anti-Semitic persecution. Moreover, a common interest in humanitarian work cemented friendships and political partnerships between Hoover and leading members of the Jewish community, particularly Bernard Baruch.
After Poland’s declaration of statehood in 1918, the Polish army began a campaign of terror against Polish Jews, including the April 5, 1919 summary execution of 37 Jewish residents of Pinsk by a Polish firing squad. Polish leader (and later first prime minister) Ignacy Jan Paderewski persisted in his claim that no Polish pogrom against Jews had ever been perpetrated, until Hoover secured his cooperation with blunt threats to withhold much-needed American support.
Hoover’s food aid to Poland was at the root of the Pinsk Massacre because the murdered Jews were reportedly meeting to discuss how to distribute Hoover’s aid when they were rounded up and shot. According to Lewis Strauss – whom Hoover put in charge of ensuring the equitable treatment of minority groups in the distribution of American aid (more on him below) – Hoover was “the only U.S. Government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/1776-commission-director-abolishing-the-commission-wont-get-rid-of-these-principles_3677164.html
“The commission, in some form, will carry on.You could abolish the commission, but you can’t erase history, you can’t get rid of these principles. That’s what we’re dedicated to. And that’s what we will continue teaching and working to defend,” Spalding said at the conclusion of the interview.
Dr. Matthew Spalding, a professor of constitutional government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College was interviewed by The Epoch Times’ program American Thought Leaders. He was the executive director of the 1776 Commission, created by executive order by former President Donald Trump.
The host of the program, Jan Jekielek, asked him some key questions highly relevant to the current intense political zeitgeist, allowing Spalding to cast lucidity on the partially forgotten, at least for the younger generations, ideals of 1776.
The new Biden administration has abolished the 1776 commission, a history-centered, patriotic education program that calls for remembrance of and upholding the nation’s founding principles.
Spalding spoke about the clashing points that juxtapose the New York Times’ controversial “1619 Project” and the United States’ founding history, along with the ideological and theological ramifications.
https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/01/27/civic_virtues_as_moral_facts_recovering_the_other_half_of_our_founding_656930.html
This essay is part of RealClearPublicAffairs’s 1776 Series, which explains the major themes that define the American mind.
Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
Few [Americans] would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could – and did – abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the “honorable determination” of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all “values” are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human “moral sense” without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/jewish_revenge_in_postwwii_europe.html
It was sometime in the 1990s, at a conference, when I met a film director with whom I became friendly, especially when he told me he had been a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto.
In his vigorous 70s, Moshe Mizrahi detailed for me some of the experiences he had undergone fighting the Nazis during the all-out valiant battle in the Ghetto uprising.
Mizrahi later invited me to his home in the “five towns.” He introduced me to his maid, a woman with a discernible Polish or Hungarian accent. She had been, she revealed without any sign of reluctance or regret, a qualified doctor in Europe during the war. The director, whose name took some effort to recall, told me his conscientious housekeeper preferred working as a domestic in the United States to working in post-war Europe as a physician, with all the privations, widespread poverty, and rancor. Plus low wages, absence of benefits, shortages.
Walking me around his home, Mizrahi remarked in an aside that she made more money, and had more comfort, as a domestic in the U.S. than as a physician in post-WWII Europe.
Among other recollections, the director told me that after the war, he, and others who had survived the life-and-death fight against the Nazi juggernaut, roamed at will through towns and outlying areas of war-torn former Nazi strongholds. He told me in undramatized terms that he had entered homes at will, taking whatever he saw that he wanted, with quiescent and obviously terrified inhabitants not muttering a peep when he came through, he plainly furious on whatever revenge he could wrest from the burghers.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/16/what-should-we-submit-to/
Ministers, “watchmen on … the wall of liberty,” according to Franklin Cole, editor of “They Preached Liberty,” were among America’s greatest revolutionary influences. The most influential was Boston Congregationalist minister, Jonathan Mayhew.
Declaration of Independence signer Robert Treat Paine called Mayhew America’s “Father of Civil and Religious Liberty.” Especially important was his Jan. 30, 1750, address, which was widely printed and read. Given for the centennial of Charles I’s execution, Mayhew argued that obedience was not due oppressive governments, because such tyranny violated the divinely-instituted purpose of government to benefit the people. And if rebellion against Charles I for eviscerating British liberty was justifiable, the same arguments applied to the American loss of liberty under George III.
As we commemorate Mayhew’s birth, reconsider his argument for our liberty, which is safe only when we recognize its fundamental importance, an argument so important John Adams called it “the spark that ignited the American Revolution.”
Such as really performed the duty of magistrates would be enemies only to the evil actions of men … But how is this an argument that we must honor and submit to … such as are not a common blessing, but a common curse, to society … If magistrates are unrighteous … the main end of civil government will be frustrated. And what reason is there for submitting to that government, which does by no means answer the design of government?
https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2021/01/the-mystery-of-theodor-herzl/?utm_source=
Not since Moses led the 40-year Exodus from Egypt did anyone transform Jewish history as fundamentally as Theodor Herzl did in the seven years from the publication in 1896 of his pamphlet The Jewish State to his historic pledge in 1903 on the subject of Jerusalem at the Sixth Zionist Congress. Then he died suddenly in 1904, at the age of forty-four.
In 2017, on the centennial of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain’s historic promise to facilitate a Jewish national home in Palestine, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Declaration resulted “largely thanks to Herzl’s brilliant appearances in England.”
Herzl created something out of nothing. He turned Zionism into a mass movement. He created the organizational and economic tools for the World Zionist Organization. Perhaps above all, he gained access to kings and counts . . . and this was no small thing [because a Jewish statesman] did not exist at the time, . . . certainly not one who was a journalist and playwright, and who was only thirty-six years old. It was unthinkable.
How did a man opposed by Orthodox rabbis (who believed a Jewish state should await the messiah), Reform rabbis (who wanted a Jewish state relegated permanently to the past), assimilated Jews (who feared accusations of dual loyalty), Jewish socialists (who considered any type of nationalism reactionary), and Jewish public figures (who thought the whole idea absurd) create a worldwide movement? How did a young writer with no political connections, no ties to Jewish organizations, and no financial backing beyond his own resources negotiate with leading figures in the Western world’s ruling empires, engaging in what Netanyahu called “inconceivable diplomatic actions” that would lead to the Balfour Declaration and eventually the creation of the state of Israel?
Those are important questions. Even more important a question is that of why Herzl did all this, given his minimal ties to Judaism and the Jewish people during his early adulthood. While he had a bar mitzvah and attended a predominantly Jewish high school, he had sought assimilation ever since his days as a university student in Vienna. Nor was he religiously observant as an adult: when his son was born in 1891, he did not have him circumcised. On December 24, 1895, six weeks before the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl was at home lighting a Christmas tree for his three children.
For many years, biographers believed Herzl became a Zionist after covering the Dreyfus trial in 1894 in Paris, as a foreign correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. More recently, however, scholars have shown that Herzl’s embrace of Zionism had virtually nothing to do with that case.
https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/churchills-favourite-spy-a-polish-jewish-woman
A Jewish woman from Poland who became a top British spy during the Second World War has been honoured with a Blue Plaque in Kensington.
Christine Granville, born Krystyna Skarbek to a Jewish mother and Christian father, was “Churchill’s favourite spy” for her incredible wartime exploits operating behind enemy lines. She survived the war only to be killed in 1952 by an obsessed stalker.
A law unto herself, Granville was first female special agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), conducting espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance missions in Nazi-occupied Europe. She was motivated to sign up in 1939 after the Nazis invaded her homeland, and was ultimately its longest serving agent.
Her recruiter called her “a flaming Polish patriot, expert skier and great adventuress”, a description she lived up to across the continent, albeit as many aliases.
Among her exploits she crossed the snow-bound Polish border on skis in temperatures of -30°C, smuggled microfilm across Europe to show Hitler’s USSR invasion plans and rescued French agents from the Gestapo.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/1619-and-all-that/
The New York Times is right: the United States was born in slavery in 1619. At least, its America was. Of course, the genteel America of mannered New York society that has formed the core readership of the New York Times since its inception never owned slaves themselves. They merely lived off the proceeds of slavery while disparaging the Deplorables who did the dirty work of cruelty and oppression on the cotton plantations of the deep South. The New Yorkers were the bankers, the brokers, the jobbers, the lawyers, the accountants, the insurers—in short, the money-men of the slave economy. They opposed slavery while appropriating its profits.
The 1619 Project, placing “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [America’s] national narrative”, is the signature initiative of today’s New York Times. Launched with the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project commemorates 400 years of slavery in America, dating from the transport of the first African slaves to the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The conceit of the project is that “out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional”. At least they left it at “nearly”.
Faithful to its subscribers (and its advertisers), the 100-page special issue of the magazine manages to mention various forms of the word “bank” fifty-six times without naming any banks that happen to be based in New York. Well, that’s not quite true. It does mention an African-American “former financial adviser at Morgan Stanley [who] chose to leave a successful career in finance to take his rightful place as a fifth-generation farmer”. How inspiring! Never mind the Pulitzer Prizes; Hollywood is on the line.
Of course, the 1619 Project did win a Pulitzer Prize for its director, Nikole Hannah-Jones. And truth be told, the individual essays that make up the special issue are pretty good. The National Association of Scholars has harped on a half-dozen or so mostly minor historical inaccuracies, but the sins of the 1619 Project are much more sins of omission than commission. There really is a straight line from the birth of the Southern slavocracy at Jamestown to the United States Constitution, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Black Lives Matter. An America without African-Americans wouldn’t be the United States we know today. In fact, it might look a lot more like … Australia.
But the aristocratic Jamestown colony of the Virginia Company, founded in 1607 and focused on cash crops, was only one of three early settlements of what would become the United States. The second was New Amsterdam, founded as a trading colony in 1614, with the first permanent settlement on Manhattan island established in 1624. While the Virginia planters populated their baronial manors with African slaves, the Dutch patroons of the Hudson valley left their massive estates largely untilled, since they were unable to attract free farmers from the Old World to become feudal tenants in the New.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/tintin-and-the-jews/
The journalist, one of the real figures on whom the cartoon Tintin was based, spent three days in the Lwow ghetto. What he saw overturns much that I thought I knew about the Holocaust. The Jews he observed in the pretty Polish city, now in Ukraine, were crammed into hell: “The life they live here is infernal. They all want to flee.”
The people:
The sons of Israel, walking vultures, wander day and night in the alleyways, as though searching for scraps. Their hands wrapped in pieces of cloth, black against the snow, heads hunched into their shoulders by the mallet of misery, thoughtful, idle, standing still for no reason, in the middle of squares like prophets without a voice and without listeners, they afforest this ghetto rather than animate it, with their tormented, cypress-like silhouettes.
The centre of the ghetto:
A market? A field of manure, yes! The rabbits, whose skins are on offer, appear to have been slaughtered with a machine gun. The furs are nothing more than a mass of hair.
Streets of misery:
On the first day, I had to rush out from one of these doghouses in order to overcome the nausea caused by the smell. For the same reason, I had to rush out on the second day and twice on the third day. The two Jews who accompanied me cried and, in the evening, they sat at my table but were unable to eat.
Here were families, their children “crying of cold and hunger and rotting on the foulest of dung heaps”. In one dark basement two small infants stand beside something:
The pallet seems to stir. We lower our candles. A woman is lying there. But in what is she lying? In wet shavings? In stable straw? I touch it; it is cold and sticky. What is covering the woman would have once been a quilt, but is now nothing more than a mush of feathers and cloth oozing damp like a wall. We notice two more heads in the mush, tiny tots, four months, fifteen months old. The oldest smiles at the flame, which we wave above them. The woman did not utter a word.
