Judaism Issues – education and deconstruction.com

Major Noah

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The Book of the Week is “Major Noah, American-Jewish Pioneer” by Isaac Goldberg, published in 1938.

Born in July 1785 in Philadelphia, Mordecai Manuel Noah was raised mostly by his grandfather. In the 1810’s, Noah, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Pennsylvania and other “Yankees” (people living in the then-northeastern United States) were expansionists– proposed that the U.S. annex Canada and Florida.

Noah engaged in various profit-seeking pursuits in his lifetime: playwriting, literary criticism, speech-making, newspaper publishing, and international diplomacy. In 1813, he was named Consul on the Barbary coast. His territory included Algeria, Tunisia– where lived about sixty thousand Jews, and Spain. He hopped a ship to get to the Mediterranean. His goal was to stop the activities of pirates in that region, and to negotiate the release of twelve Americans who were then-prisoners of the Algerians.

As is well known, early-nineteenth-century Britain had the world’s best navy; she trained boys seven to twelve years old, in seafaring. In July 1813, a British navy boat captured Noah’s, as the War of 1812 was still raging. There ensued a long, complicated,(and weird!) series of events.

Fast-forward to April 1815. American president James Monroe sent a letter to Noah informing him that he should never have been hired as Consul because he was Jewish; his religion was unfavorable with regard to foreign-service negotiations in northern Africa, so Monroe was firing him as Consul. That letter didn’t get to Noah until July 1815, at which time, Noah was “headed to a dungeon in Tunis.”

Fortunately, the deliverer of the letter, an American commodore, hadn’t read it because it was addressed to only Noah, personally. Bristling and posturing, Noah lied to the commodore in such a way that led him to demand that the British pay his personal debts. After that, Noah “got the hell out of Dodge.” He had actually gone rogue– sort of a cross between Oliver North and Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. Upon returning to the United States, he printed his own propaganda to paper over his indiscretions, and used his friends in Congress to exonerate himself.

Noah then went into the newspaper publishing business. In the 1810’s, “American journalism was not yet out of its black period– an orgy of assault, battery, libel, recrimination, accusation, bribery, scurrility, chicanery, such as makes the succeeding development of yellow journalism appear by comparison, a Sunday picnic. Such was indeed, the tradition of journalism in our adolescent United States.”

In 1820, Noah, (actually seeking to profit in real estate), put forth a big idea of purchasing Grand Island, in the city of Buffalo, New York State, to provide a colony for the “wandering Jews” of the world.

Five years later, Noah had sufficient financial backing consisting of other people’s money to start his venture, which he called “Ararat.” He gave himself the titles Governor and Judge of Israel, making announcements in newspapers worldwide. Poland’s government wouldn’t allow Noah’s public notice to be published, as his campaign was perceived as a plot to overthrow the Hapsburg monarchy.

British rabbis to whom Noah gave fancy titles and invited to his new Israel, politely declined his offers of employment, saying they were happy where they were, and that he was undeservedly acting like the Messiah; only God would know the location of apocalyptic Israel. The French and Austrian rabbis weren’t fooled either, and actually called Noah a charlatan.

In the 1830’s, when pressured to explain himself as to why he switched political parties from Democratic to Whig (conservative), he gave the best excuse ever: The party, not he, had changed! His former party had become unprincipled. So in the interest of good conscience, he switched.

Read the book to learn much more about Noah’s philosophy, writings, and machinations.

From That Place and Time

The Book of the Week is “From That Place and Time, A Memoir 1938-1947” by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, published in 1989. In this slightly sloppily edited, completely chronogically disorganized volume, the author detailed her: experiences during a time of anti-Semitism and war, and then 20/20 hindsight.

Born in 1915 in New York City, the author was sent to Hebrew school, but was only “culturally Jewish.” This, to American Jews, means celebrating the major annual holidays, but neither going to services nor observing the vast majority of religious laws on a daily basis.

The author’s parents came to the United States from Poland around 1908. They thought the Yiddish language would be the common element that would unify the Jewish community. Around the 1910’s, an American Jew, Chaim Zhitlowsky tried to popularize that idea. The author therefore was fluent in Yiddish.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, there were four different educational Jewish factions (contentious with one another) in New York City that taught Yiddish: Zionist and socialist, socialist and anti-Zionist, Communist-affiliated, and non-political but culturally Jewish (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.). The author fell into the last group.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the author perceived that American Jews didn’t have the same fears of getting bullied and victimized by discrimination as their European counterparts did. The Americans weren’t “wandering Jews.” Of course, she was always among her own kind of people, so she wasn’t exposed or subjected to hatred against her group.

In 1935, there existed a group named the Freeland League who were searching for a homeland for the Jews, other than Palestine. One place they looked at, was Kimberley in Australia. It seems the current territorial disputes between Jews and Palestinians are focused on lands they claim their ancestors occupied for centuries, and no substitute territories will do.

Anyway, Dawidowicz’s father instilled in her a hostility toward the religious aspects of Judaism, as well as toward Zionism. “Furthermore, [in the mid-1930’s] in Palestine, the Zionists denigrated Yiddish and demanded that Hebrew alone be the national language of the Palestinian settlement.”

In March 1935, in rearming for world conquest, Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty. Stalin felt he needed to make nice with the West in order to gain security for Russia. So in August 1935, the Soviet leadership announced a new policy that pivoted away from Marxism. It was the new Stalinism: collectively fighting against the Nazis and Japanese militarism.

In spring 1938, the Polish government hated its own Jews, and was looking for an excuse to refuse to accept Jewish refugees from Germany. Nevertheless, that autumn, the author went to study and do research at the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Poland. In August 1939, Stalin reversed himself and allied with Hitler so the two could take over Poland.

Read the book to learn of the author’s anguish at the historical events of the next decade, and how they affected her generation.

The Warburgs

The Book of the Week is “The Warburgs, The 20th-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family” by Ron Chernow, published in 1993. This ginormous, slightly: chronologically disorganized and redundant volume, recounted mostly, the life-stories of four males born to a German Jewish family in the mid to late 1800’s, and the life-stories of their descendants.

Through the decades, different family branches traveled or moved from Germany to other countries, such as England, Sweden and Italy, due to discrimination against Jews, and world wars. Some became fully assimilated in their adopted countries and married outside the faith. Some moved to the United States.

In September 1922, “Paul [Warburg] saw America sunk in an intellectual coma and warned Washington that ‘we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and moat of cynicism and selfish materialism…’ ” As ought to be well known, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Warburgs were “international bankers”– Hitler’s anti-Semitic code language for Jews, whom he claimed were the cause of all of Germany’s problems in approximately the two decades leading up to, and during WWII.

Aby was the black sheep of the family. He had a brilliant career in art history. The other Warburg brothers, Max, Paul and Felix became financiers, philanthropists and activists. In the 1920’s, the German government began to persecute its Jews more than was historically usual, but until the late 1930’s, the brothers evaded the brunt of the Nazis’ human-rights abuses.

The Warburgs had special influence with government officials because they had substantial assets, and their businesses’ financial transactions had a major impact on the German economy, and worldwide.

In late winter 1936, the Warburgs struck a secret deal with Heinrich Himmler that allowed them to continue doing business. However, later that year, they lost their connections to power when the Nazis forced corporate boards’ directors who were deemed Jewish, to resign. The brothers had been on dozens of boards.

The culture of the German people in their place and time was characterized by blind obedience to authority and passionate love for one’s homeland. Even after September 1937 when the brothers’ bank in Hamburg was ejected from the Reich Loan Consortium, they still clung to the hope that the Nazis’ amassing of power and menace was only temporary.

Hermann Goering scotched free trade when he formed his five-hundred employee fiefdom– the Office of Raw and Synthetic Materials. It allowed Germany to prepare for war. The Nazis needed funding for re-arming Germany, and the eventual theft of Jews’ assets would come in due time. The Jews were pawns in Hitler’s evil plan of Aryan world conquest.

A minor action symbolizing this, was the hanging of a gigantic oil painting of Hitler in the newly seized Warburg brothers’ Hamburg branch-office in May 1938. The Warburgs were allowed to choose two Aryans to run the bank indefinitely; of course, it was then unclear when or if the family would be able to reclaim their business.

In the twentieth century, the Warburgs wore the label “Jewish” that the world had thrust on them, whether observant or not, assimilated or not, for having a Jewish last name, or for having “Jewish” relatives (at the time Europe was ruled by Hitler), or having been raised by family members in this identity they felt was immutable.

“It wasn’t their [the Jews’] alien quality so much as their familiarity, their uncomfortable resemblance to other Germans, that enabled Hitler to tap fears of ‘racial pollution.’ “

Post-Holocaust, the discomfort about Jews has continued. Could it be that women who dye their hair blond, don’t want to look Jewish? And then– could it be that the Jews started the “dumb blond” jokes?

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about the histories of Warburg family members, and their times.

Bad Jew

The Book of the Week is “Bad Jew, A Family’s Quest From the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahu’s Israel” by Piotr Smolar, translated from the French by Anthony Roberts, published in 2024. This sloppily edited volume with confusing descriptions of the author, his father and grandfather– contained a brief overview of the mentality of Eastern European Jews and Arabs. As is well known, these peoples have had a long, intertwined and inter-tribally violent history in Palestine (currently Israel). American-English language would say, “self-hating Jew” not “bad Jew.”

Born in 1974, the author grew up in Normandy in France. As an adolescent, he asserted his identity by practicing Catholicism with his aunt and uncle in Warsaw, Poland. He never did receive a formal education in Judaism.

The year 1967 saw an anti-Semitic Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish government’s first secretary, denounce the author’s Polish grandfather for his Judeo-Communist views. The grandfather wrote op-ed pieces for his newspaper with a pro-Zionist, pro-Israel bent (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.). Gomulka also spread propaganda that the Jews were the ones who committed Stalin’s crimes.

In 1968, the Polish government allowed Jews to leave with the clothes on their backs, with the condition that they never return. Many went to Israel. Although he didn’t explicitly say so, the author was trying to convey the idea that, even in the late 1960’s, there was such rife anti-Semitism in the world that Israel was still relevant as a homeland for the “wandering Jew.” Israel has certainly been an exceptional sovereign territory. During its short existence of only three quarters of a century, with American financial aid, it has:

established agricultural collectives in the desert;
developed salinization and irrigation technologies;
built a military-industrial complex; and
founded numerous Big-Tech startups.

Given all the historical hostilities in Israel, one would think that the only people who still live there are ideologically dogmatic Darwin-award candidates. The author spoke with some residents who gave that impression. They are willing to risk their lives to defend what they consider their own respective tribe’s property which their ancestors owned for centuries. On the other side, the Palestinians have the same mentality.

Read the book to learn about several other reasons why the Palestinians (and Arabs) and Jews can’t work out their differences, and more about the author’s and others’ family backgrounds.

Sledgehammer

The Book of the Week is “Sledgehammer, How Breaking With the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East” by David Friedman, published in 2022.

First of all, the title of the book is an exaggeration. The author, an alpha male with hubris syndrome, penned this bragfest– along with his “funny, smart and strategic” boss (president Trump)– to take credit for campaigns he helped implement with regard to Israel and America’s Arab allies, and to express his views on Israel. He served as America’s ambassador to Israel during Trump’s presidential term of January 2017 to January 2021.

It appears he and Trump moved the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to get both of their names on a plaque on the wall in the main building there. They’ve secured themselves a footnote in history, as long as that building stands. Never mind the controversy and violence that ensued. Others might disagree– as they feel extremely strongly that there is archeological evidence that Jews occupied that particular location in ancient times, and therefore, they have a claim there. Another argument is that Jews militarily captured that location in the Six Day War in 1967.

One other hotly debated issue is sovereignty over territories where residents currently consist of both Palestinians and Jews; territories believed by the author to belong to Israel in the first place. Friedman thought the Israeli government should control those lands militarily and politically. The Palestinians of course, disagreed.

The author conducted endless discussions with the stakeholders (with a pro-Israel bent) to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. There were wrenches in the works which included but were not limited to: the Israeli government was holding elections for its top leaders, so anything said in diplomatic negotiations might influence Israeli voters; there were a few groups spouting propaganda who negatively affected the talks; and the Israeli borders with its neighbors (except for Jordan) had yet to be exactly mapped, delaying the finalization of the sovereignty issue.

The breakdown in talks with the Palestinians actually ended up helping Israel become less hostile toward a few of America’s Arab allies. The personalities happened to play well together. The then-leaders of Israel and then-leaders of: Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco made verbal agreements, or signed a brief, vaguely worded document. This, for which they had an excuse to have a signing ceremony and declare peace (and have a better chance of staying in office or getting reelected).

It wasn’t as sensational and as difficult a feat as the author described. For decades, Trump’s predecessors have held talks to give peace a chance, given changing hatreds, alliances, and global economic and geopolitical conditions.

Bahrain and Jordan already had had diplomatic relations with Israel for decades, so they were just preening for the media. For Sudan, the initial overtures were the start of a beautiful friendship. Two and a half years later, Israel and Sudan normalized their relations. About two years after Israel and Saudi Arabia began their talks, planes coming to and from Israel were allowed to fly over Saudi Arabian airspace. The author made it seem as though all this progress happened over the course of his ambassadorship. One would suspect that he is a historical revisionist for Trump.

Anyway, read the book to learn many more details on Friedman’s take on the issues and situations.

My Father’s Paradise

The Book of the Week is “My Father’s Paradise, A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq” by Ariel Sabar, published in 2008. In this sloppily edited volume, the author recounts the experiences of his father (named Yona) in Kurdistan, Israel and the United States, and his own generation– in America.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Ashkenazi Jews considered themselves superior to Sephardic Jews living in Palestine, and Kurdistan, a northern region of Iraq. The Ashkenazis had their own “old-boy” network, who subjected the Sephardics to institutional racism.

An oppressed group such as the Kurds are more likely than a dominant group to have impostor syndrome; as a society constantly smears a scapegoated group through social contagion, the victims begin to lose confidence in themselves and question their own competence. Ever since the Holocaust, the Jews, after centuries of passive acceptance of victimhood, decided enough was enough, and have fought back, releasing centuries of pent-up rage. Over the course of eighty years, they have gone from one extreme to the other. They have become ideologically stubborn and militarily aggressive.

Especially after WWII with the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine, the Iraqi government stepped up its anti-Semitism. But in the first quarter of 1950, the Iraqi government allowed Jews to relinquish their citizenship, and move to another country with just the clothes on their backs, never to return. About four thousand Jews did so.

One consequence was that Iraq experienced brain drain. Israel continued to take in skilled and talented people (and other refugees in the previous decade) who considered themselves Zionists (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.).

A January 1951 terrorist attack against Jews in a Baghdad synagogue that left three dead, prompted Israel to accept thousands more Iraqi Jews by 1952. Yona’s family left Kurdistan for Israel in April 1951.

Yona learned the languages of Hebrew and English, foreign to him. For, he was one of the dwindling native speakers of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ. With that language, he built a career researching its history, and creating a dictionary to preserve it. The author rebelled against his father, but their relationship began to thaw as the son matured. He wrote, “The idea that workers in China could make a Passover plate with Hebrew letters that you could buy in Los Angeles for a grandson in Maine: This, for my father, was America.”

Read the book to learn much more about Yona’s life and times, and the author’s quest to find his long-lost aunt.

Trotsky in New York 1917

The Book of the Week is “Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the Eve of Revolution” by Kenneth D. Ackerman, published in 2016. This volume had a misleading title, in that it described not only Trotsky’s activities, but those of his contemporaries and their times. There were backstories and flashbacks– insulting the intelligence of a reader who desired to read the book from cover to cover, rather than use it as a reference book. It repeated itself as history does; “When war [WWI] hysteria hit, people began to look for scapegoats, traitors, and spies. And the first accused of disloyalty were always the same: immigrants and socialists.”

Anyway, in January 1917, the man latterly known as Leon Trotsky, his second wife and their two sons arrived in New York City by boat. He and his wife confidently lied to immigration officials who had visited them personally in their cabin. They were able to bypass the Ellis Island third-degree inquisition because they were first-class passengers. The Spanish government paid the extra cost of upgrading them from second class because it was so eager to exile them.

Trotsky worked in the East Village office of Novy Mir (“New World”), a Russian socialist newspaper with a circulation of eight thousand. He had numerous intellectual and political friends in high places. Trotsky was a spellbinding speaker and prolific writer on socialist ideology. He doubted the elitist president Woodrow Wilson could help make peace in Europe because America was capitalist and ruled by its moneyed class. That class wanted to maintain the status quo of the gravy train of great profits derived from weapons contractors. Trotsky thought similiarly of the American Socialist Party leader– Morris Hillquit, who, as a lawyer, charged big bucks to represent labor and radical political activists and wasn’t opposed to using violence to get candidates elected.

In March 1917, after the tsar in Russia was deposed, Trotsky was on the move again, as he was a member of the Russian revolutionary organization. He and his family acquired proper identity papers and booked passage on a boat back to Russia. However, he was detained in a prison west of Halifax by Canadian authorities (ultimately ruled by Britain) for fear his native Russia would ally with Germany to defeat the French and British. He prepared several telegrams to inform various parties of what was happening with him; one of which was actually sent. This spawned letters, demonstrations, telegrams and newspaper articles in America, Canada, Britain and Russia that put pressure on officials to allow him to return to Russia.

By late 1917, Trotsky and the gang were well on their way to forming a dictatorship in Russia– breaking their previous campaign promises. Via violence, they eliminated free speech and all political activity except their own. Trotsky made the excuse that such measures were necessary to head off a French-Revolution-style peasant-uprising. However, in order to stay in power as the top leader, Vladimir Lenin scaled back the brutality by instituting the New Economic Policy. Because the common people were starving, he actually allowed them to engage in capitalist initiatives in agriculture. Of course there was corruption. Hilarity did NOT ensue.

As is well known, hilarity is associated with the American sitcom, a bygone era. Trotsky’s scene was more like a modern-day reality show– whose viewers vicariously release their rage along with the overpaid noisemakers on the idiot box. Here are the sentiments of some other Americans.

TRIPE

sung to the tune of “Escape” with apologies to Rupert Holmes and whomever else the rights may concern.

I’m tired of the president.
He’s been in office too long.
He’s a worn out recording of a boatload of wrongs.
So while he’s hiding and golfing, he’s trying to clear his head.
And his personal consultants, keep the media fed.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
All the negative emotions, and the race to defame.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t think about the president.
He’s always so mean.
He and his media slaves,
require a staged and scripted routine.
It should be in all the papers– his mind is going bad.
GOP doesn’t want to SHOW it. GOP is power-mad.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
I don’t like the xenophobia, the greed campaign.
I hope Vance steps up soon,
and cuts through all this red tape, via the 25th Amendment,
and changes the leadership landscape.

The prez can’t TALK off the cuff.
He’s in an embarrassing place.
It’s another Reagan instance.
Billionaire boys set the pace.

Vance MUST be less shady.
He’s a Millennial coup.
You can laugh for a moment.
But he’s dangerous, too.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
I’m into sane healthcare, NOT the greed campaign.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains…

==================

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Trotsky’s life and political career.

Ivan’s War

The Book of the Week is “Ivan’s War, Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” by Catherine Merridale, published in 2006.

As is well known, by the mid-1920’s, Stalin had taken over Russia, in which there had been a revolution to turn the country Communist. Beginning in 1929, Stalin forced peasant-farmers to merge their land into collectives and adopt wrong-headed agricultural methods, resulting in millions and millions of deaths from famine. Elite schools in the cities were training the upper class (and a few poor boys) for leadership.

In spring 1937, Stalin ordered many top leaders in his government and military to be fired or tortured or killed, or a combination thereof. The younger soldiers had been brainwashed from birth to be anti-Fascist and therefore to hate the Germans, so they were confused when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nevertheless, when WWII came, the Russian military incited the educated young men to lead the fight to protect mother Russia. Back home, their families were still starving.

In June 1940, the Soviet military was unpleasantly surprised by an attack on their Slavic lands by the German Luftwaffe. The now-enemy had knocked out a lot of military resources and Soviet troops had been disorganized and poorly equipped previously. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, used the occasion to inspire patriotism and incite additional hatred against the Germans.

Propaganda literally flew back and forth hot and heavy. German planes flying over Ukraine dropped leaflets that said Moscow had fallen and Stalin was dead. Turnover in the Red Army was extremely high due to: desertions, deaths from NKVD executions for desertions, and deaths from disease and enemy fire and bombardments.

In spring 1944, Soviet soldiers invaded Romania. They began to see peasants there and in Germany, Poland, France, Holland, Belgium and other capitalist places, who were living way better than they themselves had been, in their civilian lives. The young Soviet military men began to question how Communism was so great if they had been so economically poor.

Instead of setting fire to Romanian villages as they and the Germans had done to so many other battlegrounds as they were leaving, they looted corpses and appropriated farm animals, alcohol and material possessions for themselves. Black markets flourished.

When they finally marched into East Prussia and Budapest, the Soviets’ frenzy of hatred involved raping females, too. Peer pressure caused otherwise ethical men to become barbarians, and drunkenness made it easier to misbehave the way they did.

The Russian propaganda outlet “Pravda” portrayed the Soviets as victims of the Nazis, and called for revenge and reparations. It conveniently neglected to mention the atrocities they committed.

Stalin deflected blame from himself for millions and millions of Soviet deaths through the decades of his rule, by claiming he was suffering along with his people. He believed that Western capitalist cultures were a bad influence, so he demobilized the Russian Army from Germany in 1945– making them sign nondisclosure agreements. He also appeased them with a monetary bonus and (low quality) consumer goods. However, they were spied on by his intelligence service 24/7.

Stalin cast aspersions on the Jews during and after the war. One of numerous myths spread was that during the war, Jews held office jobs instead of fighting on the front lines. In 1945, Ukrainians in Kiev launched a pogrom.

The ravages of the war gave rise to adrenaline junkies with PTSD. After the war, they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and they continued to lead violent, empty lives. “Instead of aspiring to freedom, patriots would henceforth– wittingly or not– become complicit in the repression of the minorities, large-scale arrests, and a bleak and deadly dogma that had almost nothing in common with the libertarian promises that had drawn such crowds to Palace Square in the revolutionary months of 1917.”

After official histories of the war were published, Soviet censors prohibited the publishing of any additional war-related information. No one was allowed to see the archives. They were classified. Top secret.

Read the book to learn much more on the history of the Soviets’ experiences before, during and after WWII.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of non-disclosure and keeping up appearances, here’s a little ditty that describes Trump’s latest marital status.

FIRST LADY MELANIA

sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” with apologies to The Beatles, their estates and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Donald had a victory in the political race.

Melania is, standing by her man.

Donald said to Melania,

“You’ll help me save face. We’ll sign an agreement to maintain the Trump brand.”

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

Donald has a radical agenda in store.

Melania, must obey her king.

She’s stiff and aloof and doesn’t care anymore.

She knows she’s not allowed to say a thing.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For Donald it’s FUN.

But for Melania, it’s NOT!

A Man of Two Superpowers

The Book of the Week is “A Man of Two Superpowers, From Russia With Hope” by Yakov Grinshpun, published in 2022. This short, sloppily edited volume explained how and why the author came to the United States, and how he adjusted to living here.

Grinshpun was born in January 1944 in a part of Ukraine that became Romanian territory during WWII. The Russians “liberated” his shtetl in March 1944. He was brainwashed from birth into the Russian Communist system, with its extreme nationalism, “meetings, salutes, slogans, parades and uniforms.” He was taught that the Americans were evil. Imperialism and capitalism became conflated in his mind.

Grinshpun was branded as having Jewish nationality due to his ancestry, even though he had been born in Ukraine– a territory claimed by the Russians. His birth certificate and passport both said as much. This made him the target of discrimination in most major aspects of his life in the then-Soviet Union.

In February 1962, at age eighteen, the author had finally become eligible to vote for his country’s leader. Actually, voting was legally required! Even so, there was only one name on the ballot: Khrushchev’s.

At university, as a Jew, he was barred from studying medicine or law. The few jobs open to him involved mathematics or engineering. However, Grinshpun did get free tuition in exchange for three years’ worth of working for the State in the job chosen for him– physics teacher.

Even into his forties, the author had such limited knowledge about the collective mood of the people in his homeland. He wrote, “The Soviet Union endured for about seventy years, and as far as I could tell in [summer] 1989 would for many more years with its draconian policies.”

Most of the world was gobsmacked by the events of the next few months. Grinshpun explained the reason for his ignorance: infantilism imposed on him by the Soviet government: “… we were never responsible for much. We had a secure job and a place to live– both all but for life.” In exchange for having no worries, the people were conditioned to be blindly obedient to authority, and to lack critical thinking.

Nonetheless, there were a few independent thinkers such as Ayn Rand, who knew years in advance that Communism in the Soviet Union would eventually collapse. Even now, there are very few people in the world who have Rand’s kind of insight.

Instantaneous, global communications is actually part of the problem. It provides too much noise. Grinshpun was provided with too few perspectives and resources to see the big picture, given his time and place. Acquiring the ability to zero in on the correct signals takes decades of life-experience, reading nonfiction books, and for the most part, ignoring the idiot box and the media’s pronouncements.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Grinshpun’s life experiences.

ENDNOTE: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“I told my husband if we have to go to the White House, okay, I will go, but I’m going as myself. It’s too late to change my pattern and if they don’t like it, then they’ll just have to throw me out.”

-Betty Ford on the TV show 60 Minutes, aired August 10, 1975– a year after Nixon’s resignation, and a year into Gerald Ford’s presidency.

Here’s a ditty on why things stay the same.

HISTORY REWRITER

sung to the tune of “Paperback Writer” with apologies to The Beatles and whomever else the rights may concern.

History rewriter.

Dear loyal voter,
Don’t you read Trump’s books.
They took decades to spin, full of gobbledygook.
They’re bragfests involving his ex-contacts.

He needs a job, so he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter.

It’s lots of dirty stories of a dirty man and his former wives didn’t understand.
His kids were sucked into his daily World.
They got steady jobs, but he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter.

History rewriter. Rewriter.

Yet there’re millions of pages in legal truth.
There’ll be millions more in a week or two.

He’s lasted longer because he’s mastered the style. He keeps changing it round.
And he’s BEEN a history rewriter.

History rewriter.

With free speech he owns the Right. But he needs the billionaires’ oversight.

You’ll want to LOOK at transcripts.
You can’t SEE them here.
But Trump needs a break. And he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter. History rewriter.
Rewriter. Rewriter.

History rewriter. History rewriter…

On Both Sides of the Wall

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “On Both Sides of the Wall” by Vladka Meed, originally published in 1948. This book detailed the (Jewish) author’s and others’ wartime traumas of people inside and outside the Warsaw Ghetto (around which a wall was built by the German government) and the various groups who tried to minimize their death toll. The Jews were confined inside, and were required to wear white armbands (equivalent to yellow stars in other European locales). The Aryans outside were Polish people free to live their lives.

In July 1942, the Nazis began to deport the aforementioned Jews in vans that went to cattle cars that ended up at concentration camps. The local German authority, called the Judenrat, enlisted Jews– who became members of local law enforcement– to help them do so.

Bureaucratic rules dictated who got deported. Unemployed or sick Jews were the first to go to their deaths. The able-bodied were the last to be deported because they were needed for slave labor in munitions factories and workshops that made necessities (such as uniforms) for the war effort. Working Jews were issued employment cards. Of course, a black market sprung up in the cards, so the Nazis deemed the cards invalid in about a week.

Personal social ties with sympathetic non-Jews became priceless for Jews who went into hiding to escape deportation. Firstly, it was a death-defying feat to leave the ghetto; possibly by bribing guards at one of the wall’s transit-gates, or blending into a labor group leaving for work.

However, German officials inspected the identity papers of, and interrogated, every individual passing through. The officials arbitrarily engaged in beatings, atrocities and on-the-spot murders, or simply muggings or robberies (including of clothing!) of any Jew whose papers weren’t in order.

Further, there were Poles who walked the streets in groups looking for “Jews” (simply people whom they perceived to have Jewish facial features) to victimize and bully. And then there were Jews who joined the aforesaid local police force, who outed their fellow religionists so save their own skins.

The author was very fortunate that she had Aryan facial features. She took off her white armband and was able to get past the ghetto wall unharmed various times during the war years. But she constantly had to look for black-market housing and almost starved to death. Obviously, the fact that she lived to tell her story in this book spoke to her superior survival skills and great good luck. One way she significantly increased her chances of survival was that she joined the Resistance movement. Brilliant acting talent was the most crucial survival skill in that time and place.

In January 1943, a group of Jews finally (!) fought back against their deportations, via mostly hand-to-hand combat. The Jews by that time knew where the cattle cars were going. In April 1943, a Jewish group called the Fighting Organization and others began an offensive called the Warsaw Uprising. They fought against Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Poles who were gathered around the ghetto wall to carry out the last deportation roundup. At the time, the author happened to be among Aryans, outside the ghetto. But she possessed the experience to stay alive.

In August 1944, everyone in Warsaw— Poles, Jews, militias, etc.– cooperated in fighting against the Germans, in the Warsaw Rebellion. They were all sick of the years of oppression. Even so, the Poles committed evil acts against their fellow fighters who were Jews, and against the Jews forced out of hiding. The Germans ruthlessly destroyed Warsaw with weapons and arson, just to get back at their enemies.

Anyway, read the book to learn a lot more about the author’s trials and tribulations.