Mitchell Bard

The allegation that a powerful Israel lobby exerts undue influence over US policy has been front page news for years. Left largely unexamined until now is the existence of an Arab lobby that not only wields great influence but poses a threat to US interests.

Mitchell Bard will be at the Boulder JCC on Sunday, February 12 at 7 pm to discuss his provocative and eagerly anticipated new book, “The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East.”

Mitchell Bard makes the historic argument that an Arab lobby composed of big oil companies, weapons firms, and Middle Eastern despots is secretly conspiring to undermine decision making in the U.S. capital.  A foreign policy analyst who lectures frequently on U.S.-Middle East policy, Bard boldly asserts that while the lobby has a legitimate role in the debate, most people have no idea that the lobby exists, how it operates or the implications for American interests of its efforts.

After spending more than 20 years researching and writing about the influences on U.S. Middle East policy, Bard was motivated to write the first comprehensive examination of the Arab lobby because of an obsessive mischaracterization of the Israeli lobby which has helped those seeking to delegitimize Israel. At the same time, he realized that few people acknowledge that an Arab lobby exists and that it seeks to exert its own influence on U.S. policy, often working against American values and interests.

“The point of this study is to highlight how the debate may be distorted because of the vast financial resources of the Arab lobby, and to expose some of its efforts to manipulate public opinion and foreign policy, often beyond public view, in ways that have gone largely unnoticed and demand greater scrutiny.”

According to Bard, the Arab lobby has two main components. The first focuses on oil and its goal is to do whatever is necessary to guarantee that Saudi oil continues to flow, which sometimes means ignoring or subverting other U.S. interests. The other part of the lobby is the domestic Arab lobby comprised of Arab and Muslim Americans, academics, non-evangelical Christians and Arabists, whose goal is to promote the Palestinian agenda, though, he notes, they lobby primarily against Israel rather than for any positive pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab agenda.

One of the nation’s leading authorities on U.S.-Israel relations, Mitchell Bard is currently the head of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and director of the Jewish Virtual Library, the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia of Jewish history and culture. He is the author of 18 books, including “Will Israel Survive?” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Middle East Conflict.” For three years he was the editor of the Near East Report, the AIPAC  weekly newsletter on U.S. Middle East policy.

Bard, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and a master’s degree in public policy from Berkeley, has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, CBC, the Jenny Jones Show, al-Jazeera and other local and national television and radio outlets. His work has been published in academic journals, magazines and major newspapers.

Tickets are $10 at the door; free to students with ID. Reservations may be made online at https://boulderjcc.wufoo.com/forms/menorah-the-arab-lobby/. For more information, contact Kathryn Bernheimer at 303-998-1021; Kathryn@boulderjcc.org.

CU’s 2012 Holocaust Awareness Week will also adopt the UN’s theme this year which will focus on the “Children and the Holocaust.” Some children managed to survive in hiding, others fled to safe havens before it was too late, while many others suffered medical experiments or were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arriving at the death camps. Highlighting the impact of mass violence on children, this theme has important implications for the 21st century. CU’s keynote lecture, “Hidden Children of the Holocaust” on Thursday, January 26 at 7:00 pm in the University Memorial Center room 235 features University of California Davis professor and author Diane Wolf.

Anne Frank has largely shaped the image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis, yet her experience was not the norm. Wolf’s keynote lecture is based on her book “Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland” in which she draws on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Wolf analyzes the experiences of these Holocaust survivors, which were diametrically opposed to those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, especially if parents survived, leading many of those interviewed to remark, “My war began after the war.”

Diane Wolf, professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at UC Davis

Diane Wolf is professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has authored “Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland,” “From Auschwitz to Ithaca: The Transnational Journey of Jake Geldwert” and “Factory Daughters“. She edited “Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork” and co-edited “Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas“. Her current research focuses on American cultural memory of the Holocaust, children of Holocaust survivors, and comparing the religious practices of secular Jews in both Israel and the U.S.

CU’s 28th Annual Holocaust Awareness Week includes film screenings, presentations  and testimonies from survivors. The schedule of events begins Tuesday, January 24:

Tuesday, January 24 at 7:00 pm
Film screening of “Mephisto”
Boulder JCC, 3800 Kalmia Avenue
$10 at the door**
This Oscar-winning political drama is based on Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel of the same name. In early 1930s Germany, ambitious actor Hendrik Hofgen cares little for politics and lives only for his art. But when the Nazis rise to power, Hofgen seizes the opportunity to perform propaganda plays for the Reich, gaining popularity and fame. But can he survive in a world where the ideology of evil is the ultimate drama?
**Presented by Menorah: Arts, Culture and Education at the Boulder Jewish Community Center. Visit www.boulderjcc.org for details.

The House on August Street by Aylelet Bargur

Wednesday, January 25 at 7:00 pm
“The House on August Street” with post-film discussion by Diane Wolf, professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at UC Davis
University of Colorado Boulder, Atlas Building Room 100
**Free and open to the public, RSVPs are required as space is limited, email Nicholas.Underwood@colorado.edu or call 303.492.7143
From award-winning director Aylelet Bargur, “The House on August Street” tells the remarkable, unknown story of Beate Berger, a German Jew who single-handedly and with great resolve and vision rescued over 100 children during the Holocaust, smuggling them from Berlin to Palestine in the 1930s. Berger, founder of the House of Love Children’s Home (Beith Ahawah Kinderheim), Berlin’s first home for poor Jewish children, was quick to recognize the Nazi threat and resolved to protect the 120 children under her care. Raising the funds and making all the clandestine arrangements, Berger brought groups of children into Palestine from Germany from 1934 to 1939. The Beit Ahava orphanage in Haifa remains open today.

Thursday, January 26 at 7:00 pm
Keynote lecture “Hidden Children of the Holocaust” with Diane Wolf, author and professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at UC Davis
University of Colorado Boulder, University Memorial Center room 235
Anne Frank largely shaped the image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis, yet her experience was not the norm. Drawing on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland, Wolf analyzes the experiences of these Holocaust survivors which were diametrically opposed to the those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, especially if parents survived, leading many of those interviewed here to remark, “My war began after the war.”

Friday, January 27 at 10:30 am and 1:30 pm
Reading of the names and survivor testimonies
University of Colorado Boulder
University Memorial Center room 235
CU’s Holocaust Awareness Week concludes with the reading of Holocaust victims’ names called the Litany of the Martyrs which will begin at 10:00 am in the UMC. Testimonies from local Holocaust survivors will be at 10:30 am and 1:30 pm.

A complete schedule of events can be found at www.hillelcolorado.org and http://jewishstudies.colorado.edu.

Holocaust Awareness Week is presented by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Hillel and co-sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies at CU, Menorah: Arts, Culture and Education at the Boulder JCC, the Cultural Events Board at CU, and Movers: Art and Conscience community collaborative series.

Diane Wolf’s visit has been made possible by generous donors to CU’s Hillel, the Program in Jewish Studies and the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

Her talk, “The Black Book: Exile and Activism in 1940s Mexico City,” is part of Movers: Art and Conscience and Menorah’s exploration of persecuted artists in exile.

Merfish will offer a look at the site of the most extensive discussions of the Jewish Question in the history of German Communism: Mexico City circa 1943, where a group of German-speaking leftist intellectuals engaged in anti-Fascist activism in exile. There they collaborated with local artist group the “People’s Graphic Workshop” and formed “The Free Book,” the most important leftist exile press of the period.

Merfish’s work centers on the World War II activities of the Taller de Grafica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop, or TGP), founded in Mexico City in 1937, and the interactions of its members with a group of German-speaking leftist intellectuals who fled Fascist Europe for Mexico City.  The most famous of those intellectuals are Hannes Meyer, who had been the director of the Bauhaus, and Anna Seghers, the German-Jewish novelist who published the first account of the camps in her novel “The Seventh Cross,” which was a best-seller in the US and in Mexico.

In her talk she’ll focus on the book “Libro negro del terror nazi in europa” (The Black Book of Nazi Terror in Europe) published as a collaboration between this network of leftist German intellectuals and the TGP. Within the scope of one lecture, the book can be used as a window into these communities and the questions they faced in exile. One image in the book, Leopoldo Mendez’s “Deportation to Death,” has been described as the first Holocaust image to be created outside of Europe.

Rabbi Goldfeder

Rabbi Seidenberg

Friends – I had a call today from Rabbi David Seidenberg, author of the new book, “Crossing the Threshold: God’s Image in the More-than-Human World.” He saw my previous post about losing our distinctions, and he corrected me about my grave misunderstanding of his book. I stand gravely corrected – I actually have no idea what he means by “G-d’s image in the more-than-human world.” And I didn’t read his book, because it is not available yet. So, in essence, I judged a book by its cover; or at least its title. Misjudged, that is.

So Rabbi Seidenberg called me and graciously offered to dialogue with me, in public, on the subject of Torah and Evolution. And so it shall be, b’ezrat Hashem, 7:15 pm Monday January 9th at Aish Kodesh 1805 Balsam Ave. Light refreshments and some heavy conversation.

I’m excited. Dialogue is the purest form of Torah, in my view, and I look forward to discussing and learning. Hope to see you there.

Prof. Carlos Zarur and Kathryn Bernheimer

Menorah held another in their successful series on Jews from around the world on Saturday night, this time taking 120 or so community members to Greece, via the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  The evening featured a documentary on the only remaining Romaniote Jewish synagogue left in the Western Hemisphere, on Broome St. in Manhattan, in what used to be a thriving Greek-Jewish island in the middle of a larger immigrant community.

Professor Carlos Zarur then elaborated on the historical information provided in the film, following by a question and answer period that uncovered a few Boulder community members with Romaniote roots.  This was followed by a delicious meal served, according to Menorah tradition, by Menorah Board members and consisting of spanikopita, Greek salad and a traditional Greek soup.

Sherefe

After a dessert of baklava, almond biscotti and Ouzo, guests were treated to a concert of Greek and Greek-inspired music by Sherefe, which inspired some dancing as well.

The Romaniote Greek Jewish community was established in Greece during the time of Alexander the Great,  flourished there for 1100 years, creating synagogues (a word with Greek roots) and rabbis to lead them in prayer away from the Temple Judaism of Judah and Israel at the time. Starting in 1492, many of these communities were overwhelmed by the fleeing Jews of Spain and Portugal after the Expulsion.  Over the next few hundred years, most Romaniote communities became absorbed into the larger and growing Sephardic communities, leaving relatively few Greek-speaking communities with traditions that dated back to before the Second Temple.  Many of these Greek Jews immigrated to America (and the Lower East side) during the many upsets in the Balkans between 1900 and 1925, the end of which saw the expulsion of long-established Greek communities from Turkey and Asia Minor during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

As with most Manhattan Jewish neighborhoods, by the 1950′s the community started to disintegrate as the second and third generations moved away.  Broome St. synagogue managed to stay afloat, however, and survived partly by becoming a museum about Romaniote Judaism.  In the last ten years, however, the membership has begun to grow again as third and fourth generation Jews, interested in their heritage, started coming again.

Here are pictures and some video from the event:

Video of Sherefe:

As we commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, we will also show “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray,” with a discussion led by Professor Ronnie Grinberg from CU’s Program in Jewish Studies.

Copies of “All Other Nights” are available at the Boulder JCC Library, HaSifria.

The event is January 29^th, 4-8 pm. Cost is $18; includes film, book discussion and a Civil War-themed dinner (including corn chowder and apple pie).

Take our Civil War trivia test:

1. How many Jews were living in America at the time of the Civil War?

a)    15,000

b)   150,00

c)    500,000

2.  How many Jews fought in the Civil War?

a)    5,000

b)   10,000

c)    30,000

Judah Benjamin

3.  Judah Benjamin, the most prominent and highest ranking Jewish figure in Civil War history, fought on the side of…

a)    The Union

b)   The Confederacy

4.  What were the largest centers of Jewish population during the Civil War?

a)    New York and Philadelphia

b)   Charleston and New Orleans

An elder of the village, Vysni Apsa, ca. 1945-38 ©Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy of International Center of Photography

The Movers: Art and Conscience collaborative together with Congregation Har HaShem, the Mizel Museum and the Program in Jewish Studies at CU Boulder are excited to offer an evening with Maya Benton, the director of the Roman Vishniac archive and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York on Thursday, December 1 at 7:30 PM at Congregation Har HaShem located at 3950 Baseline Road, Boulder.

Roman Vishniac was a Russian-American photographer and biologist who was best known for his dramatic photographs of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. His photographs shape our memory of that vanished world, yet only a small selection of his images – a very small fraction of his life’s work – has ever been printed or published. The recent donation of Vishniac’s entire estate to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York includes tens of thousands of negatives, contact sheets, prints and a lifetime of personal correspondence and ephemera.

Curator Maya Benton will be discussing the process of establishing the Vishniac archive at ICP, and will present recently discovered work, including never-before-seen moving film footage, images of Zionist agrarian training camps in Holland before World War II and Displaced Persons camps in Berlin following the War, photographs made in America in the 1940s documenting the work of Jewish social service organizations, as well as a large selection of contact sheets, negatives, and never-before-seen work from Central and Eastern Europe.  She will also discuss the influence of

European modernism and avant-garde movements on his most accomplished work. Benton will also address new research focusing on the commission of Vishniac’s photographs by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), repositioning Vishniac within the broader context of commissioned social documentary photography in the 1930s, and revealing a profoundly versatile artist who belongs firmly in the canon of the great photographers of the 20th century.

Featured in a New York Times profile, Maya Benton is director of the Roman Vishniac archive and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP).  An A.B.D. at Courtauld Institute of Art, her research focuses on documentary photographs of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, Israeli contemporary photography and video art, and more broadly, Jewish visual culture and vernacular photography.

Benton has recently curated exhibitions on the work of photojournalist Ruth Gruber, a series on contemporary Israeli video art, and is currently establishing a major public archive of Roman Vishniac’s work at ICP, in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.  This work will culminate in a traveling retrospective and catalog on Vishniac, set to open at ICP in 2013. The archive and exhibition have recently been awarded a lead National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant.  A slide show of Vishniac’s photography is available online.

Additional images from the Vishniac archive are available for publication in association with the promotion of this event.  Please contact Jamie Polliard at Jamie.Polliard@colorado.edu or via phone at 303.492.7143 for more information.

Dmitriy - the Star of David - Salita

Dmitriy Salita, a Jewish professional boxer, will be starring in Westminster on Saturday night November 5^th at Chabad of NW Metro Denver. However rather than sporting his boxing gloves and robe, Dmitriy will be presenting a talk about his life as a young Ukrainian Jewish immigrant to the US who began a boxing career alongside a path in Judaism.

Said Rabbi Benjy Brackman of Chabad, who is hosting the event:

His story combines two seemingly opposite worlds, boxing and religion, yet he successfully merges the two and comes out a champion, this is a tale or personal and spiritual growth at every level.”

This will be Dmitriy’s first appearance in the metro Denver area.

The evening will begin at 7:00 pm with a screening of the documentary “Orthodox Stance” that depicts Dmitriy Salita’s boxing career and his growth in Judaism, then at 8:30 pm Dmitriy will make a presentation followed by a Q&A.

Guests can join the program for the screening at 7:00 pm or for Dmitriy’s talk and Q&A at 8:30 pm.

Ticket prices are just $10 each and include the film and refreshments.

For more information visit www.TheChabadHouse.com or call 303.429.5177

About “Orthodox Stance“

Dmitriy Salita is a Russian Immigrant, professional boxer and a religious Jew. “Orthodox Stance” portrays Dmitriy’s maturation in each of these disparate communities and the seemingly incompatible cultures, and characters working together to support his rare and remarkable devotion to both Orthodox Judaism and the pursuit of a professional boxing title. In the end the film is about more than just boxing and religion, but about a young man’s search for meaning in life.