Movies, antisemitism & modern Jewish identity

On April 19, New York's Center for Jewish History hosted what was billed as a graduate seminar on "Anti-Semitism at the Movies." Rachel Gordan, a Harvard doctoral student in history, discoursed on "Gentlemen's Agreement" and "Crossfire"---both nominees for the Academy Award as Best Picture in 1947; the former, starring Gregory Peck, emerged as the winner. Peck played a newspaper reporter, a nondescript Protestant, who posed as a Jew to write an expose about the "gentlemanly" anti-Jewish prejudice that pervaded American society at the time.

Ms. Gordan screened the breakfast-table scene where Peck's character explains to his son what Jews are. He patiently indicates that just like Catholics and Protestants go to their churches to pray, Jews attend their houses of worship called synagogues or temples; he also adds, when prompted by his son's ignorance, that Jews are just as American as they are.

The respondent, Yale University historian Dr. Tisa Wenger, and later Dr. Nancy Sinkoff, a Rutgers University associate professor of Jewish studies and history who moderated the program, both mildly critiqued Gordan in how she defined Jews. During the Q & A, I sharpened this critique by pointing out that she kept on referring to individual Jewish identities as their "Judaism" rather than their "Jewishness," as I'd refer to it. Gordan's narrow religious definition, rather than a broader lens of cultural heritage and/or ethnic affinity, is a product of her generation growing up in an American society where Jews are more accepted, and where secular Jewish organizations and activities are in decline.

I mentioned the irony of Gordan's religious focus as we sat in the home of YIVO, the famed research institute mostly dedicated to the study of secular Jewish culture and history, and at a time when a good half or more of self-identifying American Jews are not affiliated with a synagogue or temple.

I've written previously on this matter of secular Jewish identity and how it relates to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state in terms of its majority population rather than religion. In Israel, secular Jewish life is more in evidence and more viable; even the non-religious or only moderately observant majority lives within an unmistakeably Jewish culture, in which the Hebrew language and the rhythms of the Jewish calendar are paramount. Jewishness viewed only as "Judaism" goes against the visceral self-understanding of most Jews as progeny of an ancient people, for whom Israel's existence as a Jewish state is not analogous to the designation of numerous Muslim-majority states as "Islamic" in some theological sense.

Yet, as was pointed out by one or other of the two older scholars, the notion of Jews as simply a religious group was easiest to convey in movies and the larger society. This religious emphasis was adopted as a strategy by the organized Jewish community. More than one writer has written on how Jews became accepted as being "white." And with the memory of the Holocaust still fresh in those years, viewing Jews as a distinct ethnic group had to come uncomfortably close to the concept of race, which had turned so poisonous under the Nazis and has had such an unhappy history in this country as well.

The second movie, "Crossfire," was about a murder investigation that uncovered an antisemitic motive. During the Q & A, it was pointed out that antisemitic violence, or the threat of violence, was all too common in early to mid 20th century America. But in my understanding, the most pervasive manifestations of antisemitism included the restrictive covenants against Jews in housing and in access to hotels and resorts, restrictions against Jews being employed in many law firms and on Wall Street, and quotas against Jews being admitted to first-rank universities and medical schools.

Jews shared with African Americans being targets of discrimination, and forged an alliance in the civil rights movement based on this common interest. Major Jewish organizations--such as the ADL, American Jewish Congress and A. J. Committee--played important roles in support of civil rights, especially in the area of legal action.

As an aside, and as a commentary on how far we've come from those years, I attended a talk at the CUNY grad center in which a sociologist discussed how Arab Americans are being encouraged to write themselves into the Census forms as being of "Arab race," as a tactic to obtain more clout for their community. Although I wouldn't advise this tact for Jews, I think that we should find ways (whether we are religious or not) to identify ourselves as a distinct minority group that is vulnerable to discrimination or worse.

The contention that the American Jewish community constitutes one of the three major American faith groups--along with Catholics and Protestants--is no longer functional for us as Jews, as well as out of date (Muslims and Hindus are increasingly significant in this country).

Human Rights Watch 'civil war' over Israel

Very interesting story at The New Republic website by Benjamin Birnbaum. Background in-depth piece on the Human Right Watch shift of leadership, the story behind it, and how it is related to HRW's treatment of Israeli infractions...and much more:

On October 19 of last year, the op-ed page of The New York Times contained a bombshell: a piece by Robert Bernstein, the founder and former chairman of Human Rights Watch (HRW), attacking his own organization. HRW, Bernstein wrote, was “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” The allegation was certainly not new: HRW had been under assault for years by American Jews and other supporters of Israel, who argued that it was biased against the Jewish state.

And these attacks had intensified in recent months, with a number of unflattering revelations about the organization. In July, HRW found itself under fire when a Wall Street Journal op-ed noted that the organization had solicited donations in Saudi Arabia by trumpeting the criticism it faces from “pro-Israel pressure groups.” In August, the blogosphere leapt on one of the organization’s top Middle East officials for having once been part of a team that edited a radical anti-Israel journal. And, in September, HRW suspended one of the primary contributors to its reports on the wars in Gaza and Lebanon after his private hobby—collecting Nazi memorabilia—became public.

Still, to most readers of the Times last October, even those who closely followed debates over Israel, Bernstein’s piece would have seemed odd: It isn’t every day that the founder of a group turns so publicly on his own creation. What few people outside HRW knew, however, was that Bernstein’s op-ed was the culmination of a long struggle inside the organization that had turned increasingly acrimonious over the years. The debate revolved around a single question: Was the world’s most respected human rights group being fair to Israel? Bob Bernstein wasn’t the only person at Human Rights Watch who thought the answer was no.

In September 2000, HRW’s board of directors took a vote that still, a decade later, infuriates Sid Sheinberg, a legendary Hollywood mogul (he discovered Steven Spielberg) and current vice-chairman of the board. At the time, Bill Clinton was trying desperately to broker a peace agreement between Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak, but one of the major sticking points was the right of return. It was an issue that even the most left-wing Israelis did not feel they could compromise on: If Palestinians were permitted to return to Israel en masse, it would imperil the country’s future as both a Jewish state and a democracy.

Sheinberg believed strongly that HRW had no business endorsing the right of return. “My view is that the most essential human right is the right to life,” he says. “And anybody who sees a deal about to be made where there’s been war for fifty or sixty years should think hard about shutting up.” The board, however, did not agree. “The vote was something like twenty-seven to one,” Sheinberg recalls. “Bob voted against me, for which he’s apologized on a number of occasions.” That December, Ken Roth, HRW’s executive director, would send letters to Clinton, Arafat, and Barak urging them to accept the organization’s position. The right of return, he wrote, “is a right that persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands.”

Click here to read more online.

Financial Times: Israeli Peace Activists Return

Here's an article I saw in the "Financial Times" which I thought would be of interest:

One Friday last October, a group of 24 young Israelis marched through the streets of Jerusalem to protest at the eviction of several Palestinian families in the city's occupied east. ...

Six months, dozens of arrests and hundreds of newspaper headlines later, the small band of Israeli peace activists has surprised itself by taking on the appearance of a full-blown political movement.

The regular demonstrations have broadened into protests against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in general. Some Israelis also come to register their disapproval of police action against the gatherings, adding freedom of speech to the other grievances.

As a result, the protesters' ranks are now studded with some of Israel's most prominent intellectuals and writers, notably David Grossman, the author. The Friday demonstrations are attended by hundreds of people every week, with one rally in March drawing almost 5,000. ...
Read this entire article by Tobias Buck online at this website.

Wiesel and Jerusalem

Last week, Elie Wiesel made a divisive foray into the dirty world of politics - despite his puzzling and certainly naive disclaimer that "Jerusalem is above politics". Did he really say, "Jerusalem is above politics"? (For the text of the ad that Wiesel placed in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times, click here.)

Wiesel's ad was essentially a broadside at the Obama administration - an effort to retard its moves to push for a comprehensive solution to all the final-status issues of Israel-Palestine - Jerusalem included. Some bloggers have even claimed that Wiesel was put up to it by Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, and that Netanyahu's friend, Ronald Lauder underwrote the costs.

Regardless of who was behind the ad, Wiesel is certainly a tough figure for American Jews to take on. A Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, a powerful writer and a philanthropist, Wiesel has an aura of gravitas and tremendous moral authority.

But Israelis - who have to live the consequences of "earthly Jerusalem", and don't have the luxury of waxing poetic on "Jerusalem of God" - have not been shy about telling Wiesel what they think of his impassioned intervention. First, Yossi Sarid rebuked Wiesel for his misguided theo-philosophical focus: "Is life itself not holier than historical rights, than national and personal memory - holier even than Jerusalem?"

Now a group calling itself "Just Jerusalem", which includes Israel Prize laureates Avishai Margalit and Zeev Sternhell, as well as former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, has sent an open letter to Wiesel in which it bemoans his detachment from earthbound reality:

"Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women and men, who wish their city to be a symbol of dignity - not of hubris, inequality and discrimination. You speak of the celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one. ... [Your letter] upholds an attachment to some other-worldly city which purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one."

Wiesel is truly an important and rightly-esteemed figure. But his well-earned reputation has been gained by stressing the universalist responsibilities of humanity, not the particularist sentiments that divide people and stoke resentment and hatred. Let us hope that his recent entry into the world of public diplomacy was an aberration, not a new direction.

Israeli films too 'edgy' to win Oscar?

This year's Oscar winner in the Best Foreign Language category, The Secret in Their Eyes, began its American commercial run last week. I saw it in a preview screening a couple of weeks back.

Among the four flicks it beat out was Ajami, the latest of three straight finalists from Israel that came up short. Writing for JTA, Tom Tugend has speculated on why Israel's superbly high quality and innovative film industry has not yet come up with this ultimate prize:

To general surprise, the winner turned out to be the little-seen or publicized Argentine movie “The Secret in Their Eyes,” a thriller about an unsolved 25-year-old case involving the murder and rape of a young woman. Critics have become used to odd choices by the foreign film selection committee, but this year’s pick seemed to repeat the previous year’s pattern too closely to be coincidental. In both years, four of the five finalists were edgy, tough and innovative films, while the fifth tended to be softer, conventional and more in the Hollywood tradition.

Due mainly to a convoluted selection process, the judges on the selection committee tend to be older academy members with more time on their hands and more attuned to traditional movies. Schory has no doubt that these circumstances led to the selection of the conventional Argentine film over the edgier entries, such as the highly favored “A Prophet” from France, “The White Ribbon” from Germany and “Ajami.”

“What happens is that a large portion of judges favored the one conventional film, while the rest split their votes among the more innovative films,” said [Katriel] Schory [executive director of the Israel Film Fund], who left Los Angeles immediately after the Oscar ceremonies to return to Israel. A similar analysis was proposed last year by Kenneth Turan, the respected film critic of The Los Angeles Times, when the obscure Japanese film “Departures” beat out far more sophisticated entries from France, Germany and Israel. ...

In a NY Times review that shares this viewpoint, A.O. Scott described Departures, last year's winner from Japan, as follows: "Overlong, predictable in its plotting and utterly banal in its blending of comic whimsy and melodramatic pathos, Departures is, in the end, interesting mainly as an index of the Academy’s hopelessly timid and conventional tastes."

Having not seen it, I cannot evaluate Scott's opinion of Departures, but after seeing the Argentinean film, I'd tend to discount this view of the selection process. Although not trailblazing in the way that Ajami and perhaps some of the other contenders were this year, there is nothing particularly conventional about it. It essentially stitches two timelines together: one from the era of corruption, violence and lawlessness that characterized Argentina in the 1970s--before and during its rule by the right-wing military junta--and the latter in the early 1990s. It is not without flaws--e.g., it makes an unnecessary twist that tediously drags out its conclusion--but it is fundamentally gripping and powerful.

In 2008, a language issue prevented the poignantly comic The Band’s Visit from being Israel’s nominee, because the Egyptian and Israeli characters communicated to each other in English---as they would have in real life. In my view, The Band’s Visit would have been a stronger contender than the grim war drama, Beaufort, which lost out to Austria’s The Counterfeiters---a searing Holocaust film that was not in the least bit conventional.

My feeling is that 2009--with Waltz with Bashir, a psychological war drama rendered into animation--should have been Israel's year. I still wonder if Israel was being punished by the Oscar committee for its bloody invasion of Gaza, which had only ended a couple of weeks before the awards ceremony. Surprisingly, insofar as I can recall, this possibility was not part of the discussion.

Happy Birthday Israel (Dovish reflections)

With all my appreciation for the video of Israel's achievement being circulated on the Net in conjunction with Israeli Independence Day called "Israel - Defying all Odds" (granted that some of the rankings of the achievements are questionable), I have some serious problems with the concluding statement which notes that there are 26 countries that describe themselves as Muslim, 18 that describes themselves as Christian, and only one Jewish country. That implies that the definition of Israel is based upon religion, whereas the founders--from Herzl through Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Jabotinsky--saw Israel as the state of the Jewish nation or people. That's also what Netanyahu means when he asks that people recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

The last thing we need is for the unresolved Israeli-Arab conflict to become a Jewish-Moslem religious conflict.

Yesterday evening I participated in an Alternative Memorial Day ceremony at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv, a growing phenomenon, with at least 1,000 people, most of them in their 20s.

It was a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony for all the people who have fallen on both sides, with artists, poets and activists. I was particularly moved by the presentation by Bassam Aramin, the Palestinian co-director of Combatants for Peace, whose 8 year old daughter Abir was killed by IDF soldiers on her way to school. He said that he longs for the day when all Palestinians will stand for two minutes of silence on Yom Hashoa, in memory of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, which he called the most evil event in world history, something which he did in the privacy of his office in Ramallah. He longs for a day when Israelis and Palestinians, living in peace, will stand together to remember the fallen on both sides.

Another one of the people who made a powerful, moving presentation at the evening was Rami Peled-Elhanan, whose 14 year old daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in the nearby Ben-Yehuda promenade in Jerusalem.

Bassam held up a joint photo of Abir and Smadar, moving the audience to tears.

And for the second time in three days, I heard a performance of the late Meir Ariel's powerful 1967 counterpoint to Naomi Shemer's Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, Yerushalayim Shel Barzel (Jerusalem of Iron). Ariel, who grew up in Kibbutz Mishmarot, was a paratrooper in '67 who became known as the "Singing Paratrooper." He wrote his version of the song in the middle of the war--which became very popular with the soldiers--to declare that war is not just glory, and that the true goal for Jerusalem is not liberation but peace.

As the siren just sounded at 10 a.m., I just stood in memory of those who fell, those who I knew in my IDF units, including my deputy commander, from the neighboring kibbutzim, fellow students, a senior lecturer at TAU, relatives of friends and all those I didn't know.

I wish all a meaningful Yom Hazikaron, and a Yom Atzmaut Sameach,
Hillel

New disaster brings back Polish tragedies

It was en route to a historic commemoration of the massacre of thousands of Poles by Stalin's secret police, in the Katyn Forest, that Poland's top echelon of national leadership was wiped out in a plane crash last week. The current willingness of Russia's post-Soviet leadership to acknowledge this crime in its Stalinist past, is one silver lining of these twin agonies. Exactly one year ago yesterday, I provided a Jewish gloss on the movie, Katyn, for the New Jersey Jewish Standard ("Poles apart---in film as in life"):

Katyn, the most recent work of the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda and a finalist for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2008, was held over for a month in its run at New York’s Film Forum, the city’s premier art house. It depicts the Soviet murder of thousands of captive Polish army officers during the spring of 1940 and reverberations of the massacre’s aftermath several years later. Dire, in some instances fatal, consequences befell Poles who insisted on the truth, after the war, as to who was really responsible for this atrocity.

Poland, a medium-sized country of approximately 30 million, mobilized a million men when Nazi Germany struck on Sept. 1, 1939. The film opens on Sept. 17, 1939, with refugees fleeing the Germans meeting others running in the opposite direction from Soviet forces. Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler had sealed Poland’s fate.

The filmmaker’s father was among the victims at Katyn, a forested area near Smolensk, deep within Russia. This mass crime is so obscured amid larger crimes that even the film and its promotional material vary in the number of victims cited: 12,000, 15,000, and 22,000.

Wajda was a protégé of Aleksander Ford, a Polish Jew who headed Polish film productions in the immediate post-World War II period. Ford (who had renamed himself in honor of the American film icon, John Ford) was obedient to the Communist regime’s propaganda needs — as he had to be, to make films at that time. One of his efforts, Border Street, was strikingly “pro-Jewish” in its sympathetic depiction of the Jewish plight in the Warsaw Ghetto. It even depicts the saintliness of a pious old Jew who perishes — surprising because of the militant atheism of the Stalinist state — but it also highlights the fighting spirit of younger Jews, including one child, who resist with weapons in hand.

That film’s production values, including battle scenes and plot lines, are extremely poor, undoubtedly reflecting both a limited budget and political requirements for preachy dialogue. A few Jews were visibly prominent in the new Communist government. The film as a propaganda tool proclaimed the need for Jews and non-Jews in Poland to work together to build a new progressive order; it emphasized the fact that they had faced a common Nazi foe. Anti-Semitism is explicitly reviled in Border Street, whether exhibited by Nazis or by ordinary Poles.

Stalin, like Hitler, was a film buff who avidly screened films in private. Ford is reported to have been told in no uncertain terms by Stalin that Border Street was “too Jewish.” But it was not until 1968, during anti-Semitic purges, that Ford was ousted from his job and from Poland. He lived in Israel, Denmark, and the United States, making two films that were not well received, before taking his own life at a Florida hotel in 1980.

By contrast, Wajda has had a long and illustrious career creating films of artistic note even during the Communist era. This particular film, Katyn, is somewhat disjointed. Post-war segments introduced characters who were hard to place in the story, at least for this non-Polish speaker.

There is nothing in Katyn, not even the dominant scenes of wartime and post-war Krakow, that is specifically Jewish. Yet research has so far identified 231 Polish-Jewish officers murdered at Katyn.

By this, I do not mean to argue that there’s anything intentionally anti-Jewish in Wajda’s work. Several of his films have Jewish characters who figure in them positively. But this work reflects what was a fact in war-time Poland: that the struggles of Catholic Poles and of Jews were of a completely different order. They suffered separately (especially after most Jews were ghettoized), even to the extent that Warsaw was the site of two totally separate anti-Nazi uprisings — the revolt of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943 and the general Polish rebellion in the summer of 1944.

Jews captured during the former were doomed whether they were fighters or not. The Polish freedom fighters of 1944 were permitted to surrender to the Germans after a prolonged battle (depicted cinematically in Wajda’s Kanal) and incarcerated as prisoners of war.

The Polish underground rebelled in Warsaw when Soviet forces were virtually at the city’s gates. Stalin ordered his armies to halt to allow the Germans to eliminate their ostensible ally, a fighting force loyal to the Polish government in exile in London. Six million Polish citizens perished during World War II — three million Catholic Poles and three million Jews. The non-Jewish death toll was about 10 percent of the population of Poland; the Jewish death toll was more than 90 percent of Poland’s Jewish population.

Yehuda Bauer, a renowned Israeli Holocaust historian who is conscientious in respectfully analyzing the historic disasters suffered by a variety of peoples, explicitly characterizes the Polish experience in World War II as a species of genocide. The Nazis intended to reduce the Poles to a nation of semi-literate peasants and manual laborers serving the Third Reich. Polish intellectuals and professionals were imprisoned and murdered in great numbers to deprive the Poles of independent-minded leadership.

One of Wajda’s characters is a university professor summoned with the rest of the faculty to be harangued by a Nazi official, who then herds them off to a concentration camp where the professor dies. But non-Jewish Poles as a “race,” as the Nazis regarded them, were meant to be enslaved rather than exterminated.

O, Jerusalem -- Israel Symposium postscript

Uri and Yael, first cousins on my mother's side, are a rather typical middle class couple, moderate Israelis who live in a suburb of Haifa. Longtime supporters of the Labor Party, their votes are now up for grabs. And hopeful constituents of Rabin and Peres during the 1990s peace process, they now voice disdain for the sincerity of the Palestinian Authority leadership's peaceful intentions. This view seemed almost universal among Israelis we saw on last month's Meretz USA Israel Symposium and in my own travels the week after, until my return about 12 hours before seder time.

On Jerusalem in particular, Yael surprised me with her opinion on the ongoing disagreement between Netanyahu's coalition government and the Obama administration on the right and wisdom of continuing to build housing for Jews in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. "We have no choice," she said.

There is a choice, of course, and this choice that Israel has made is a poor one, because it gobbles up the very ground that is required for a territorial compromise in Jerusalem that would help make a two-state solution possible. While on a tour of East Jerusalem with our very knowledgeable (and patriotic) Israeli guide from Ir Amim, we looked down upon a shiny new neighborhood there. Our guide asked rhetorically if Israel or the Jerusalem municipality suddenly saw the light in providing sidewalks and other amenities to treat its East Jerusalem Arab residents equitably. The answer sadly is "no"; the new traffic circle, the new buildings, the playground and the sidewalks are there for the convenience of new Jewish residents in a development now called Nof Tsyon.

This links to a long NY Times blog post which discusses the issue of Jerusalem in detail.

On the dangers of 'Christian Zionism'

For those who doubt the dangers of "Christian Zionism," I recommend the writings of Rachel Tabachnick in ZEEK, the hip Jewish journal linked online to The Forward. In "Disenchanting Zionism," she writes of the alliance of right-wing Christian Zionists with Kahanists and other Israeli elements who are displacing Arab residents of East Jerusalem, among other noxious things:

“Israel, the Jewish State, is not a political entity,” describes Gary Cooperberg, the former foreign press spokesperson for Meir Kahane in his 2001 post titled “Biblical Zionism is the Only Path to Peace.” He continues, “It is the beginning of fulfillment of Biblical Destiny. It concerns not only the Jewish People, but all nations of the world. Redemption has clearly begun, and all the nations are being judged by G-d. The nation of Israel too is being judged by how it behaves. The terror we see in Israel today is in direct correlation to the failure of our leaders here to conduct national policy according to Biblical mandates.”...

Gershom Gorenberg cites Kahanist Gary Cooperberg, in his book End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. According to Gorenberg, Cooperberg sent a fax to journalists after fellow Kahanist Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 Purim massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers during prayers at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. He stated that Goldstein’s “desperate act of love for his people… will some day be recognized by all Jews as the turning point which brought redemption upon us.” Gorenberg explains that Goldstein had told friends days before the massacre that he had a plan to stop the peace process.

John Hagee [a leading fundamentalist Christian Zionist] describes the murder of Yitzhak Rabin as part of a divinely ordained plan. “The shot that killed Yitzhak Rabin launched Bible prophecy onto the fast track,” he pronounces in his book Beginning of the End, and proceeds to describe those Jews who desire peace as “cultural or ethnic Jews who place no great importance on the religious beliefs of the Jewish people.” Hagee continues with his frequently used narrative that Israel, in its quest for “peace at any price” will “entrust its security to the Antichrist,” therefore partnering in the formation of the the “New World Order.”

It is curious that Jews who would not think of embracing Kahanism will happily endorse the partnership with Christians who promote Kahanists and their own parallel religious fanaticism. ...

Tabachnick goes on to quote a BBC interview with the current non-religious mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, who curiously uses a Biblical argument to justify new Israeli building projects in disputed East Jerusalem territory. On our recent Meretz USA Israel Symposium, we saw some of the construction projects in evidence; our guide (a progressive Zionist contracted for us by Ir Amim) noted the fresh sidewalks and other amenities for new Jewish residents, in contrast to the general neglect of infrastructure for East Jerusalem Arabs who are routinely denied permits to expand their housing stock.

By way of bringing up the social justice consciousness that still exists among some Zionists, Tabachnick also mentions that a leading Israeli protester for the rights of Palestinians in the embattled West Bank village of Bilin, Didi Remez, is an IDF combat veteran and the scion of an associate of Ben-Gurion who was a minister in Israel's first cabinet. If you have the chance, follow her link to Leon Wieseltier's caustic commentary on the embattled lives of Palestinian families today whose ancestors saved Jews during earlier hostilities.