by Oui
Tue Feb 11th, 2020 at 12:52:23 PM EST
Many Jews supporting Bernie Sanders lost family during WWII and the Holocaust. A build-up to a year where the Democrats offer a wide-range of candidates and the party is looking for an answer to unseat the Republican "President by default" in November 2020. Lacking political stability in America ever since the 9/11 attacks, the US is at risk to be devoured from within ... gun violence, opioids crisis, poverty, large scale inequality, the American Dream is not for every citizen, education and healthcare. The American aggression on the battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Africa and the Middle East has become part of a populist rightwing movement in the West as a result. There is hope: a Jewish Voice for Peace - Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders: Senator Gets Emotional Talking About Jewish Relative Who Died Fighting Nazis | Newsweek - |
In the clip, the Jewish senator is visibly moved as he discusses the relative with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.
"I'm proud of his courage, and willingly going to his own death in order to protect innocent people," Sanders says. "So I'm very, very proud that I have a family member who showed that type of courage and decency."
The Jewish Weekly reported many of Sanders's relatives perished in the Holocaust. His father, Eli, grew up in Slopnice Poland before immigrating to the United States at the age of 17. Almost all of Poland's Jewish population--90 percent--were systematically eradicated during the Holocaust.
Continued below the fold ...
Sanders rarely discusses his Jewish identity in depth, but talks in the show about how the horrors of the Holocaust motivated him to become involved in politics. He said his own career was borne out of a desire to "prevent the descent of humanity."
"It just makes us realize how hard we have got to work to not descend into this type of barbarity and to create a world where people can love each other," he said. "That's what this reinforces in me."
Dutch documentary aired on Christmas 2009 - I watched a rerun last night:
Anne Frank's classmates look back in new film
MONTREAL -- Her poignant diary and tragic death have given Anne Frank an almost mythic status over the past six decades. But a new documentary film, chronicling a reunion of some of her classmates, is a reminder that Frank was a flesh-and-blood person, a teenager like any other, if more talented and perceptive than average.
Classmates of Anne Frank, an Israeli-Dutch co-production, is also a reminder that its absent heroine, who remains forever young in the imagination, would have been 80 years old in June. Seeing her grey-haired old school friends gathered in Holland to reminisce about her and the dark times they shared brings that home starkly.
Frank died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945 at age 15, about a month before the concentration camp was liberated. Watching her contemporaries talk about how they survived and where life led them after the war naturally makes the viewer wonder wistfully about what might have been for the ill-fated diarist.
In the film, the ex-classmates talk about what type of person Frank was and their relationship with her. Coster remembers that he was sweet on her, but found her too formidable a character to approach for a date.
Coster, a well-known games creator in Israel, and his Israeli-born wife, Ora, were the main organizers of the reunion and are the executive producers of the film. He survived the Holocaust in hiding in a village and has lived in Tel Aviv since 1955. He has spoken many times in schools and elsewhere over the years about Frank and the experience of the Jews of Holland during the war.
The Boers and Coster families were friends going back to 1872 in Amsterdam, where Boers' father was born in 1948.
"About 80 per cent of my family on my father's side were lost in the Holocaust. It's a subject I've been exposed to since I was very little.
Full documentary - Dutch spoken / parts English
Very impressive documentary, gives insight in the German occupation, razzia’s to deport Jews to Westerbork, a transit camp, before the families were send to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Especially Auschwitz, Sobibor and Theresienstadt were mentioned in the experiences of these children of 11 thru 13 years at primary school and a year on Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam.
Asked what has become of their lives, it was quite amazing all these persons have made a difference for their community and family. Asked to give a mark about the value of their lives, the classroom average was extraordinary high: a 9 on a scale from 1 to 10. In US terms, an A+! Usually in this program, the class average is placed between a 7 and 8.
This documentary was a joint Dutch-Israeli production. I suspected such, as there was a moment when Maurice Coster spoke of a comparison from the days he arrived in Israel of 1955, a nation filled with ideals. The rest about Israel today was left out. Nanette 'Nanny' Blitz, lone survivor of her family in Bergen-Belsen, emigrated to Brazil and opened an Anne Frank School in Belo Horizonte.
Another lady was active in political activism for peace in the world. Her name is Letty de Levie and she lost her dad and brother, murdered as they were ousted from Auschwitz on a death march to a German interior camp Buchenwald. Here she has written her story, her father was GP in Amsterdam and took two decisions to remain with his patients and not attempt to flee from the Netherlands. On the death march he tried to save his son by carrying him mile upon mile. One moment a German soldier saw in how bad a state his son was, took him from his shoulder and executed Herman de Levie on the spot on the road.
○ Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
How many times does human kind need a reminder we all inhabit Planet Earth, for bad or worse, but need to live together in peace and make society a better place for all. It ain't easy and requires true effort and diligence. Some of the credentials from the life of Bernie Sanders ...
Kibbutz experience
50 years on, Bernie Sanders still champions values of his Israeli kibbutz | Times of Israel - Feb. 2016 |
Sha'ar HaAmakim was a bastion of socialism when the Vermont senator volunteered there in the '60s, and continues to preserve `social democratic values'
Every morning, Bernie Sanders would wake up at 4:10 a.m. to pick apples and pears.
Leaving the cabin he shared with a few other American college student volunteers, Sanders would have a quick bite of bread before heading out to the orchard. After 2 1/2 hours of work, he and the other 20 or so volunteers would sit down for a traditional 30-minute Israeli breakfast of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, butter and hard-boiled eggs.
It's hard to know his routine for sure, but that spartan schedule was standard fare for American and French volunteers at Sha'ar HaAmakim, the Israeli kibbutz where the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate apparently spent several months in 1963. The name of his kibbutz had remained a mystery until last week, when Haaretz unearthed a 1990 interview with Sanders identifying the agricultural commune.
Revisiting Bernie Sanders' Socialist Roots in Israel | Israel24 news - video |
Roots of Socialism in the Founding of Israel
Organizational Foundation of Labor Zionism in Palestine -- 1905
The defeat of Herzl's Uganda Plan [some researchers say East Africa or Kenya - Oui] ensured that the fate of the Zionist project would ultimately be determined in Palestine. In Palestine the Zionist movement had to devise a practical settlement plan that would ensure its economic viability in the face of extremely harsh conditions. Neither Herzl's political Zionism nor Ahad HaAm's cultural Zionism articulated a practical plan for settlement in Palestine. Another major challenge facing the fledgling movement was how to appeal to the increasing number of young Jews who were joining the growing socialist and communist movements in Russia. To meet these challenges, Labor Zionism emerged as the dominant force in the Zionist movement.
The intellectual founders of Labor Zionism were Nachman Syrkin and Ber Borochov. They inspired the founding of Poalei Tziyyon (Workers of Zion, see Appendix B)--the first Labor Zionist party, which grew quickly from 1906 until the start of World War I. The concepts of Labor Zionism first emerged as criticisms of the Rothschild-supported settlements of the First Aliyah. Both Borochov and Syrkin believed that the Rothschild settlements, organized on purely capitalist terms and therefore hiring Arab labor, would undermine the Jewish enterprise. Syrkin called for Jewish settlement based on socialist modes of organization: the accumulation of capital managed by a central Jewish organization and employment of Jewish laborers only. He believed that "antiSemitism was the result of unequal distribution of power in society. As long as society is based on might, and as long as the Jew is weak, anti-Semitism will exist." Thus, he reasoned, the Jews needed a material base for their social existence--a state and political power.
○ The Left's Views on Israel: From the establishment of the Jewish state to the intifada | LSE - A Thesis |
Within the [British] Labour Party (and the French Socialist Party) the virtual consensus of support for Israel was maintained in 1956; was tested but not completely broken in 1967 and more or less collapsed in the early 1980s. Within the British and French communist parties, the initial support for the formation of the Jewish state broke down by the 1956 crisis and the parties adopted a consistently pro-Arab perspective thereafter. However, in the 1980s the extreme anti-zionism of earlier periods was replaced with a more tolerant approach to Jewish nationalism. The left's attitudes did not derive directly from democratic socialist or communist principles. Non-ideological factors including political expediency, linkages between the left and the nationalist movements, intraparty organisational developments and the campaigning activities of certain individuals were critical to understanding the left's policy positions.
The secret behind the Sanders campaign: people before tech | Common Knowledge |
he Iowa caucuses this week were a tale of two political technologies. There was Shadow Inc's disastrous app for tallying votes, funded by a team drawn from [Clinton/]Obama-era politics and technology, which failed due to impossible timelines, a lack of training and testing, and a likely measure of hubris. And then there was the political technology of Bernie Sanders' campaign, which won the popular vote in Iowa.
Each of these point to differing approaches to the interaction between politics and technology in Democrat election campaigns over the past decade or so. It is the key difference between an approach characterised by mobilising (top-down and centralised) and one characterised by organising (bottom-up and distributed).
Partly by virtue of its sheer scale, US electoral politics has always been a proving ground for new deployments of political technology. The first time digital technology was adopted with real success was Barack Obama's first campaign in 2008, which made effective use of social media ...
The Sanders campaign did not junk data entirely, but supplemented it with face-to-face interaction. The "big data'' of the Obama era had given way to big organising. Niche targeting of specific demographics gave way to a social democratic, universalist message regarding issues such as healthcare.
The techniques that evolved out of these campaigns have increasingly emphasised "relational organising": placing relations, conversations and existing human networks at the centre of efforts, rather than data-based targeting. In 2020, the Sanders campaign's Bern app is encouraging people to "have open, honest, and thorough conversations with our friends, family, and neighbours" and record their information, persuading them over the course of the campaign. This simple technique is a hallmark of traditional campaigning, but the communication power of digital technology helps it take place on a massive scale.
Bernie's Army of Coders | Politico - Feb. 2016 |
As the Jewish State of Israel has become most powerful in the Middle East, it has become racist and Islamophobic. The abuse of Holocaust as a theme has become political and does not embrace a vision of the future for mankind. Israel seeks friends amongst the most authoritative regimes around the world and the settler community in no way resembles the ideals of Zionism and community spirit. It's become a caricature of Biblical History of David against Goliath. In contemporary times, the roles have been reversed, so has the ugliness of politics in Jerusalem.
○ My Brush with JDL Bombers: Murderers of Palestinian-American Activist Live Freely in Israel
As so often, my inspiration to write this diary comes from Tikun Olam, Richard Silverstein.
Discussing the issues during this worthy political presidential campaign of 2020? From the defeat of progressives in Europe and the UK referendum and sweeping victory by Boris Johnson, keep it simple. A smear campaign of your opponent works miracles in any democracy.
