"Permitam compartilhar com vocês segredos que aprendi do judaísmo. Eles lhes proporcionarão felicidade – seja o que for que o destino lhes reserve no próximo ano.
1 – Saibam agradecer. Uma vez por dia, no inicio das orações da manhã, agradeçam a Deus por tudo que Ele lhes tem proporcionado. Só isto já será suficiente para os trazer a meio caminho para a felicidade.
2 – Saibam louvar. Prestem atenção em alguém que está fazendo alguma coisa certa e o elogiem. Muitas pessoas, quase sempre, não são apreciadas. Ser reconhecido, agradecido e receber congratulações de alguém é uma das coisas mais reconfortantes que pode nos acontecer.
3 – Dediquem algum tempo às famílias de vocês. Casamentos e famílias felizes necessitam que se dedique tempo a elas.
4 – Saibam descobrir significados. De vez em quando, separem um tempo para fazer a si mesmos as perguntas: "Por que estou aqui? O que espero alcançar? Qual a melhor forma de empregar meus talentos? O que eu gostaria que dissessem a meu respeito depois que eu não estiver mais aqui?"
5 – Vivam de forma coerente com seus valores. A maior parte de nós acredita em ideais, mas raramente atua de acordo com eles. O melhor a fazer é estabelecer hábitos que nos façam agir diariamente segundo estes ideais.
6 – Saibam perdoar. Esta atitude é o equivalente emocional a perder excesso de peso. A vida é por demais curta para nela carregarmos ressentimentos e procurar vinganças.
7 – Continuem a crescer. Não se imobilizem, especialmente na vida espiritual. A maneira judaica de transformar o mundo é começar por você mesmo.
8 – Aprendam a escutar. Muitas vezes, numa conversa, passamos metade do tempo pensando o que dizer no próximo instante em vez de prestar atenção no que a outra pessoa está dizendo. A palavra chave no judaísmo é Shemá, que significa simplesmente "Escute".
9 – Criem momentos de silencio para sua alma. Libertem-se, ainda que apenas por cinco minutos a cada dia, da tirania das tecnologias, do celular, do laptop e de todos os outros invasores eletrônicos. Lembrem-se que Deus está em cada partícula de ar que inalamos. Aspirem o ar da existência e sintam a alegria de ser.
10 – Transformem o sofrimento. Quando lhes acontecerem coisas ruins, usem-nas para se sensibilizar com a dor dos outros.
A vida é por demais repleta de bênçãos para desperdiçar tempo e atenção com substitutos artificiais. Viver, doar, perdoar, celebrar e louvar – estas ainda são as melhores formas de fazer uma prece à vida, transformando assim a vida numa bênção."
Fonte: Editora Sêfer
18.2.13
New York Yankee Mariano Rivera Named Man of Year by Rabbis
Future Hall of Famer Honored With Trip to Israel
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Do-Gooder: Mariano Rivera, the indominable New York Yankees relief pitcher, has been named man of the year by the New York Board of Rabbis.
By JTA
Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera will be named Man of the Year by the New York Board of Rabbis and will be given a guided tour of Israel.
Rivera, the record-holder for most career saves, was chosen because of his philanthropic efforts and extensive relief work for Panama through his church, said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the executive vice president of the interdenominational rabbinic group.
“Mariano is a very religious person who is deeply committed to doing good, and is a strong supporter of Israel,” Potasnik told JTA. “We will be doing a family trip after baseball season and the Jewish holidays later in the year.”
The group is still deciding on Rivera’s exact title, as well as the time and location of the ceremony.
Mazel Tov, Montreal!
By Renee Ghert-Zand
YOUTUBE
Michael Applebaum
With his election, Michael Applebaum has become not only the first non-native French speaker in a century to hold the post. He is also the first-ever Jewish mayor of the second-largest French speaking country in the world.
“It’s definitely a proud day,” Leo Kolber, a businessman, philanthropist, former Canadian senator and lifelong Montrealer, said about Applebaum’s swearing-in ceremony on Nov. 19.
Applebaum, 49, was chosen by a two-vote margin by city councilors after he ran as an independent calling for transparency in government, following the resignation of former mayor Gérald Tremblay. Tremblay resigned earlier this month as a result of revelations made by the Charbonneau Commission exposing widespread corruption among Montreal officials, contractors and members of organized crime.
As Montreal mayor, Applebaum must step down as borough mayor of Cote des Neiges/Notre Dame de Grace, one if the city’s most heavily populated boroughs, and one with a high concentration of Jewish residents. His interim post will last only until municipal elections scheduled for November 3, 2013. Applebaum has stated that he will not seek re-election.
“I see very clearly what people are saying on the street,” Applebaum told The Montreal Gazette. “I am very much a goal-oriented person and I think we have an opportunity,” Applebaum said. “I personally have an opportunity to really make a difference.”
Critically, in a province in which language-based cultural identity permeates politics, Applebaum is bilingual, although he admits that his French is a bit rusty and that he speaks with an accent. “People may criticize me for my French. I will make errors, but I’m very proud to be able to speak and work in the French language. I’m going to do the best I can,” he said.
“What is interesting to me about this story is that Mr. Applebaum is being widely hailed as making history as the first non-francophone mayor of Montreal to hold the position in a hundred years. He also happens to be a Jew,” Rebecca Margolis,author of an award-winning book on Yiddish culture in Montreal remarked. “In Quebec’s current political climate, language trumps religion as the ultimate marker of identity.”
“The fact that Michael Applebaum is Jewish and anglophone…demonstrates the huge gap between the lovely, warm, mutually-respectful day-to-day realities of life in Montreal, and the xenophobic, divisive, demagogic religious, cultural, and linguistic bigotry of the separatist Parti Québécois,, McGill University history professor Gil Troy said in addressing the same issue in stronger terms.
Along the same lines, Kolber expressed doubts as to whether Applebaum would have won a regular election (rather than a vote among city councilors), given “the make-up of the city.”
But what matters right now, says Kolber, who has personally met the new mayor, is that “he’s a nice man and he works hard.” With Applebaum having his work cut out for him, Kolber is adopting a wait-and-see attitude. “Let’s see what happens,” he said.
For Beverly Akerman, a freelance writer and author who has lived her entire life in Montreal, transparency trumps religion. “What we need is someone who can raise the shades on the dark rooms of municipal politics, let in some light, the ultimate disinfectant,” she said. “I prefer an honest, competent mayor of any faith over a mayor whose only distinction is Judaism, any day. I’m sure most Montrealers feel the same.
Troy agrees. “As with all such milestones, I look forward to the day when we can simply welcome a Mayor Applebaum for what Montreal most needs in a mayor, an honest, efficient, effective leader, rather than focusing on where he prays, who his people are, or which of the two ‘official languages’ he speaks,” he said.
On Her Majesty’s Semitic Service
The Untold Jewish History of the James Bond Flicks
By Seth Rogovoy
It’s hard to imagine anyone less Jewish — or more goyish — than James Bond: He of the shaken-not-stirred-martinis; he who serially beds the blond, buxom “Bond girls”; he who drives the latest, fastest, gadget-equipped sports car. He may be the hero, but he’s no mensch. The United Kingdom newspaper the Daily Mirror recently called the fictional secret agent (and sometimes it’s easy to forget that Bond is an invented character, not a real person) “a British icon as enduring as the Royal Family and the Rolling Stones.”
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Quantum of Prejudice: Ian Fleming might be surprised by the Jews who have made James Bond an icon.
In fact, Bond was the literary creation of novelist Ian Fleming, a notorious right-winger who, like many Englishmen of his generation, wore his anti-Semitism on his sleeve. Fleming’s books, unlike the much more popular films they spawned, occasionally trade in vulgar and hateful Jewish stereotypes, and whenever a character does seem Jewish, he is always a villain.
Yet from its beginning a half-century ago, from the 1962 “Dr. No” up through the most recent entry in the series, “Skyfall” — the 23rd Bond film, which opens in the United States on November 9 — Jews have played an essentially creative role in the James Bond film series. “Skyfall” features a Jewish director (Sam Mendes), and an actor, Daniel Craig, who, while not Jewish himself, is well known for his portrayal of heroic Jews (including roles in “Defiance” and “Munich”) and who is married to the prominent British Jewish actress Rachel Weisz. (Besides which, my mother always said it was a dead giveaway that a celebrity is Jewish when he sports two first names, like Laurence Harvey or Jack Benny.)
Even on a grander scale, a Jewish-inspired theme plays out in this gem business of a movie series, whose titles include “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever.” Fleming based the title character of “Goldfinger,” who is Bond’s nemesis, on Ernö Goldfinger, the real-life Hungarian-born Modernist architect and leftist who was a neighbor of Fleming’s in Hampstead. Fleming invested his Goldfinger, renamed Auric (meaning “gold” in Latin), with an obsession with power. The movie “Goldfinger” elides the character’s Jewish origins, which in Fleming’s original are the subject of some consideration. Ironically, German actor Gert Fröbe, who portrayed Goldfinger in the film, had been a member of the Nazi Party during World War II.
Hollywood being Hollywood, a place more friendly and conducive to Jewish participation than Fleming’s universe — fictional or otherwise — there have been plenty of Jewish contributions, or contributions by people who happen to be Jewish, to the James Bond corpus:
Ken Adam, aka Sir Kenneth Adam, OBE, was the production designer on all the classic 1960s and ’70s Bond films, from “Dr. No” in 1962 to “Moonraker” in 1979. Adam was born in Berlin in 1921; his father and uncles were successful high-fashion clothiers, prominent in the city since the late 19th century. Adam and his family left for England in 1934, after Nazi harassment forced them out of business. Adam was one of only two German nationals who flew planes for the wartime Royal Air Force; had the Germans captured him, he could have been executed as a traitor rather than kept as a prisoner of war.
Irvin Kershner, whose directorial credits include “The Empire Strikes Back” and the TV movie “Raid on Entebbe” (for which he received an Emmy nomination), and who played the role of Zebedee, the father of the apostles James and John, in Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” helmed the 1983 Bond film, “Never Say Never Again,” which marked Sean Connery’s return to the title role and made Kershner the only person to direct both a “Star Wars” film and a James Bond film, two of Hollywood’s most successful franchises. (The Bond films are second only to the Harry Potter films in total revenue.)
Harry Saltzman, born Herschel Saltzman in Quebec, was the proverbial rebel who at age 15 ran away from home and joined the circus. During World War II he served with the Canadian army in France, where he met his future wife, Jacqui, a Romanian immigrant, and began his career as a talent scout. He wound up working as a producer for theater and then film in England in the mid-1950s, and afterreading Fleming’s “Goldfinger” in 1961, he optioned the film rights to the Bond stories.
Saltzman’s friend, screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, introduced him to the American-born Albert R. Broccoli, who also wanted to make James Bond films. Together, Saltzman and Broccoli formed Eon Productions, the company that to this day — still owned by Broccoli’s heirs (Broccoli bought out Saltzman in 1975) — produces the official Bond movies. Mankowitz, a native of London’s East End, which was the heart of the Jewish community at the time, was an incredibly prolific and successful writer whose outlets included musical theater, novels and screenplays, one of which is the first draft of the first Bond film for Eon, “Dr. No.” Mankowitz allegedly asked that his name be removed from the credits, fearing that the film would be a flop and damage his reputation. Ironically, the release of security files in 2010 showed that Mankowitz was suspected by the MI5, the British security service, of being a Soviet spy.
The 1967 film version of “Casino Royale,” based on Fleming’s very first Bond novel, is one of the only ones not produced by Eon, although Mankowitz had a hand in writing the screenplay, as did fellow Jewish writers Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller and Billy Wilder (along with Terry Southern, John Huston and Val Guest). The spoof featured actors Woody Allen and Peter Sellers.
New York-born screenwriter Richard Maibaum, who already worked for Broccoli before the latter began producing the Bond series, wrote most of the classic Bond films. Maibaum began his writing career in New York as a playwright, and his work included the anti-lynching play “The Tree,” and “Birthright” — an anti-Nazi drama. Maibaum contributed to all but three of the Bond films, beginning with “Dr. No” and running through “License To Kill,” in 1989. More than anyone, perhaps even Fleming, Maibaum can be said to have created and sustained the mythical icon of Bond. Mensch or not, Bond has proved to be an enduring figure over the past 50 years, one whose image has been shaped, prodded and refined — in significant measure by Jews — far beyond anything Fleming might have imagined or, indeed, may have wanted.
Seth Rogovoy, an award-winning cultural critic, is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet” (Scribner, 2009).
Bob Dylan's 10 Most Jewish Songs
'Blowin' in the Wind' Made List, But Just Barely
By Seth Rogovoy
While Bob Dylan has, throughout his life and career, engaged in all sorts of mythologizing and playful biographical falsification, it has never been in the service of denying his heritage.
This son of a middle-class appliance salesman from the Upper Midwest, who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother down the hallway in an extended Jewish family that was at the nexus of Jewish life in Hibbing, Minn. — mom was president of the local Hadassah, and dad was president of B’nai B’rith — wound up making several trips to Israel in the late-1960s and ’70s (during one visit, he even began the application process for moving his family to a kibbutz). He sent his children to the same Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin that he attended for four or five summers as a teenager.
CHRIS WOOD/EXPRESS/GETTY IMAGES
It Takes a Lot To Laugh: Jewish ideas inform Dylan’s work.
By the time he arrived in New York City’s Greenwich Village 51 years ago, he intended to make a name for himself on the folk scene — and that name was Dylan, not Zimmerman (the name is German and not Jewish, anyway, although his forebears were from Russia), and Bob fashioned himself a latter-day Woody Guthrie (as it turns out, Guthrie himself had a whole secret Jewish side to his work, born of his close relationship with his mother-in-law, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt).
So while Dylan didn’t exactly grow up to be Shlomo Carlebach, the happy, guitar-strumming Hasid, he never strayed too far from his roots, nor did he deny them. One of his earliest original numbers, in fact, was a parody of “Hava Nagilah,” then and now (thank you, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman) probably the best-known Jewish song in the world. Throughout his career, his songs have been peppered with biblical allusions and paraphrases and informed by Jewish themes and concepts. How much of this is the result of a conscious effort on Dylan’s part to address these issues, and how much is simply the result of magpie tendencies that see him draw variously from Shakespeare, French symbolism, movie dialogue, blues clichés and even obscure Japanese yakuza novels? Well, only Dylan can answer that — and even then, probably not.
Still, based on the evidence of the songs themselves, Dylan was actually paying attention in the Hebrew classes leading up to his bar mitzvah, and also in his adult life, which has at times reportedly included private studies with various rabbis, often from the Chabad movement. A cursory review of songs from the past 50 years turns up many tunes that are inflected with varying degrees of Yiddishkeit.
- “Talkin’ Hava Nagilah Blues” Fresh off the boat (okay, the car) from Minnesota, the 20-year-old Dylan made this novelty in which he struggles to pronounce the words before letting loose with a yodel, a staple of his Greenwich Village folk-club gigs.
- “With God on Our Side” Years before “Schindler’s List,” Dylan takes to task “the Germans” for having “murdered 6 million… in the ovens they fried” in this 1963 protest song.
- “New Morning” Nu, morning?
- “All Along the Watchtower” The 1967 song, which continues to be a cornerstone of Dylan’s live performances to this day, may be best known in its Jimi Hendrix version, but its narrative and imagery are basically a rearrangement of material cribbed from Isaiah 21.
- “Forever Young” Dylan poetically rewrites a father’s blessing over his children at the Sabbath table, invoking the story of Jacob (“May you build a ladder to the stars /And climb on every rung”) to connect it to his own youngest son, who would grow up to be a rock star, outselling even his father.
- “Highway 61 Revisited” A midrashic retelling of the sacrifice of Isaac (“Oh, God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on”) by the son of Abe Zimmerman, who was born just a few miles from U.S. Highway 61.
- “Gotta Serve Somebody” The Grammy Award-winning centerpiece of, and hit single from, his first so-called born again album could easily be seen as a tribute to Jewish mothers everywhere. (It also alludes to Joshua 24:14-15.)
- “Neighborhood Bully” Dylan warms the cockles of the most rabid, right-wing Zionist, positing Jewish history and the State of Israel like some rock ’n’ roll Vladimir Jabotinsky.
- “Everything Is Broken” Swamp-rock meets Lurianic Kabbalah.
- “Blowin’ in the Wind” Perhaps his best-known anthem, the song that made him a household name, it is a litany of unanswered, unanswerable questions. What could be more Jewish?
Seth Rogovoy is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet” (Scribner, 2009).
A Brazilian Bar Mitzvah Video Goes Viral
By Andrea Palatnik
Forget about the religious ceremony: A bar or bat mitzvah is an opportunity for the family to show off its riches, with lavish parties in fancy hotels and enough food to feed a small town. Right?
Well, at least that’s how I remember it, growing up in Rio in the 1990’s.
Every weekend there would be two or three bar mitzvahs, and parents who knew each other too well in such a small community (composed of mostly Ashkenazi Reform Jews) would ostentatiously compete to see who could serve the most expensive champagne; who could hire the most popular band; who could book the swankiest venue.
Then, in those years before the mass adoption of digital photography and video, bar and bat mitzvah parties began to feature a usually embarrassing tradition (for the boy or girl): A “surprise” slideshow for all guests to see, right before dinner was served, featuring embarrassing childhood pictures. There would be those classic shots of you as a naked baby trying to lick your own feet and of you as a toddler during a potty training session; or a photo of your mom with a weird hairdo from the 80’s holding you as you blow the candles on your first birthday cake. But that was about it, and everybody marveled at the time at the corny PowerPoint effects.
Being far from bar and bat mitzvah parties (and from Rio for that matter) for a while, I was surprised last week when my Facebook timeline got crammed with multiple posts linking to a video from Brazil named “Nissim Ourfali’s Bar Mitzvah.” Who was this kid and why was there a video — of his bar mitzvah, I presumed — trending like crazy on social media?
Well, it turns out that the slideshow tradition in bar and bat mitzvahs has evolved to the point where families now hire a video production company to put together a short “video clip” of the kid, lip synching to some teen pop hit parody in which he talks about his life.
And that’s what Nissim Ourfali, an upper middle class Sephardic boy from Sao Paulo, does in his video — which is almost up to three million hits on YouTube.
Visibly shy, Nissim appears in the three minute video singing a parody version of “What makes you beautiful,” by British boy band One Direction, gesticulating with his skinny arms and hands and dancing. “Eu sou o Nissim Ourfali” (“I am Nissim Ourfali”) replaced the chorus (“what makes you beautiful”) and is repeated a dozen times during the song. Behind him flows a sequence of photomontages of him, his parents and siblings and photos of the family’s trips around the world.
One Direction, “What Makes You Beautiful”
The video has been mocked in every possible way, while dozens of covers, memes and animated gifs have been created and spread across the web. There’s even a Tumblr where people can upload their own version of the most infamous moment of the video, when Nissim sings “The best part is when we go to the whale” — meaning the Whale Beach (Praia da Baleia), in Sao Paulo’s northern coast — and a surreal montage of the boy on top of a killer whale appears.
Noemy Lobel, the video producer hired by Nissim’s parents, told a Brazilian newspaper that the family is “in shock” over the video’s reception, and decided to take down the original YouTube video. Nissim, however, is not suffering any kind of bullying at school — his friends “loved” the video, said Lobel.
17.2.13
Lou Reed's Return to Dark Roots
'Lou-Tallica' Collaboration Rebounds From Bad Press
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Rock Star: Reed’s album ‘Lulu’ was hated by critics, but it’s better in person.
By A.J. Goldmann
“Lulu,” the unlikely collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, rapidly went from being one of the year’s most anticipated releases to being the most reviled album of 2011. USA Today called it “arty sludge” and gave it one star. Writing in Grantland, Chuck Klosterman lambasted it as “a successful simulation of how it feels to develop schizophrenia while suffering from a migraine, although slightly less melodic.” Gothamist reported that Reed had even received death threats from “betrayed” Metallica fans.
Apparently, Reed has gotten over the bad press. This summer, he is performing songs from “Lulu” across Europe. In late June, Reed brought the career-spanning tour “From VU to Lulu” to Berlin, the European city most closely associated with his music. Thousands braved the bitter wind and rain to see the founder of The Velvet Underground perform on the open-air stage of the medieval fortress in Spandau, one of the city’s 12 boroughs. Supported by an excellent band and by singer-songwriter Allison Weiss on back-up vocals, Reed put on a slick and tightly engineered show that, without intermission, clocked in at slightly less than two hours.
What wasn’t apparent to most reviewers of the album but is clear from performances is that despite the novelty of “Loutallica” — the inevitable moniker for the collaboration — the songs that Reed wrote for “Lulu” signal a return to his signature dark rock ’n’ roll idiom. In both a literal and an artistic sense, “Lulu” also marks the singer’s return to Berlin, a city that has influenced Reed for the past four decades.
In the early 1970s, Reed spent time in West Berlin hanging with other foreign transplants, like Iggy Pop and David Bowie. His solo album “Berlin,” released in 1973, was a depressing hymn to a city that has influenced musicians, from Kurt Weill to Nick Cave. The record follows a destructive relationship in the divided capital and includes themes of drugs, domestic violence and suicide. On the album’s most disturbing track, “The Kids,” Reed sings about a negligent mother who loses custody of her children after her daughter dies. The song is notable for the shrieking kids in the background. Direct on the heels of his hit 1972 record “Transformer,” Reed shocked critics and listeners alike with a collection of ballads wry and cynical enough to be a Weill/Brecht collaboration.
Though recognized today as one of Reed’s finest solo albums, “Berlin” was panned at the time of its release. Rolling Stone was unequivocal when it called Berlin a “disaster.” It didn’t help that Reed’s fans were expecting another glam smash after “Transformer” and not a heavily orchestrated rock opera with lots of nasty.
In Reed’s oeuvre, “Berlin” is the work that most anticipates “Lulu,” thematically if not musically. Reed wrote the songs featured on the new album for a Berlin production of fin-de-siècle German playwright Frank Wedekind’s two plays “Erdgeist” (“Earth Spirit,” 1895) and “Die Büchse der Pandora” (“Pandora’s Box,” 1904), known together as the “Lulu” plays. Directed by legendary avant-garde American playwright Robert Wilson, the production opened in spring 2011 at the Berliner Ensemble, where it is currently in repertory. Lulu, the plays’ heroine, is equal parts minx and naïf, femme fatale and victim. In the course of the plays, she kills three husbands before winding up in London as a prostitute trailed by a desperate lesbian lover. Her last client is Jack the Ripper. It’s wild stuff.
Reed is no stranger to themes of twisted sexuality, and, like Wedekind, he is able to raise perversity to the level of art. Since the beginning of his career with The Velvet Underground, in the 1960s, he has broken all the rules of rock ’n’ roll with his unsparingly graphic depictions of sex and addiction — a tendency explained by author Steven Lee Berger as a rebellion against his middle-class Jewish upbringing. He wrote songs like “Venus in Furs” (inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s kinky novella), “Some Kinda Love” (“Like a dirty French novel / combines the absurd with the vulgar”) and “Walk on the Wild Side,” which dwelt on drug use, male prostitution and oral sex.
With his songs for “Lulu,” Reed seems to be picking up where he left off almost 40 years ago. His lyrics are notably crass, and largely unprintable in this publication. “I wish there was a strap of blood / That you could kiss away / Tie me with a scarf and jewels / Put a bloody gag to my teeth,” Reed bellows in one of the tamer verses of the song “Mistress Dread.”
At the open-air stage in Spandau, the audience howled along to Reed standards, including “Heroin,” “Sweet Jane” and “Satellite of Love,” but the “Lulu” songs were also received enthusiastically. Hearing them alongside Reed’s earlier material, and minus Metallica, the “Lulu” selections were convincingly of a piece with the musician’s body of work. Reed made a compelling argument for this continuity by playing the final tracks of “Berlin” and “Lulu” back to back. “Sad Song,” a mockingly upbeat anthem from the earlier album, inhabits a different melodic universe than “Junior Dad,” a 10-minute-long, spoken-word poem with minimal instrumental support. But they are bound together by a spirit of tender pessimism and by verbal repetition that points to a bitter, sarcastic nostalgia. The songs on “Lulu” are difficult listening — largely unmelodic, with wrenchingly vulgar lyrics — but then again, Reed has always been an iconoclast who revolts against the expectations of his listeners.
Watching Reed perform, I wondered about his impressions of this contemporary city, a place so different from the divided capital he knew nearly four decades ago. I’m curious because I sense that Reed feels an affinity with the old Berlin and a kinship with the artists incubated in a city whose reputation for creative experimentation and excellence continues to this day. Stefan Zweig, the Jewish author from Austria, once described the world from which “Lulu” emerged as a “sticky, perfumed, sultry, unhealthy atmosphere.” Present-day Berlin is less contaminated than it was during the epoch that Zweig wrote about, but it still has a unique mixture of edginess, sophistication and daring. I imagine that’s what attracted Reed to this city 40 years ago — and what brings him back today.
A.J. Goldmann writes about art and culture from Berlin. He is a regular contributor to the Forward.
World's Strongest Girl Lifts Twice Weight
Naomi Kutin Is 10, Weighs 99 Pounds, Lifts Amazing 215
By Naomi Zeveloff
The strongest girl in the world is an Orthodox Jewish 10-year-old from Fair Lawn, N.J.
Naomi Kutin, a soon-to-be sixth-grader at the Yeshivat Noam day school in Paramus, can lift more than twice her own 99 pounds. In January she set a world record for women in her weight class (then 97 pounds), beating competitors decades older than her to squat 214.9 pounds at a meet in Corpus Christi, Texas. On the first Sunday in July, she established two regional records for her age group, with a 199.5-pound squat and a 209.4-pound deadlift.
But ask Naomi about her powerlifting prowess — unusual for a 10-year-old and virtually unheard of for an Orthodox girl — and she’ll just say this: “It’s kind of weird being stronger than an adult.”
Naomi, who is 4 feet 9 inches tall with a sturdy figure and a sandy blond pageboy haircut, practices lifting in the basement of her family’s two-story home, where a handwritten “No Fear” sign hangs next to a white porcelain mezuza. A recent practice session there provided a tableau of a Sunday afternoon in the life of an observant Jewish family surely like no other:
Naomi’s father, Ed Kutin, wearing a yarmulke and a gray shirt with a picture of an eagle grasping a barbell, prepared Naomi for a squat, rubbing a cylinder of white chalk across her back. She dipped her hands into a cardboard box of loose chalk powder.
“The chalk is getting into my nose!” she squealed. “Well, you’re not lifting with your nose,” said her mother, Neshama Kutin, crouched in a long jeans skirt in the corner of the room to spot the lift.
Naomi then steadied herself in a wide leg stance in front of the barbell, propped at chest-height on a metal stand. Her father loaded several discs onto the 45-pound bar — a total of 205 pounds. Naomi gripped the bar, glancing back and forth between her hands and making “shush” noises to focus. She rolled her head under the bar, placing it on top of her upper back. Face red, eyes bulging to the ceiling, she lifted the bar from its stand and then lowered herself onto her haunches.
“Take it low. Come on, Supergirl,” her mother said. “You can do this. No fear.”
Naomi first started lifting two years ago. Her father introduced her to it after watching her outshine the boys in her karate class. Ed Kutin bears the formidable mustache of a circus strongman. He became acquainted with the sport in the campus gym of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he went to college. He now holds several national records in the deadlift, a maneuver that entails hoisting a weighted bar off the ground with both hands. Powerlifting — a derivative form of Olympic weightlifting — has three movements: the deadlift, the squat and the bench press.
Ed and Neshama Kutin proceeded with caution as they trained Naomi, researching the health effects of child weightlifting. But Ed Kutin said he found that the typical warnings — stunted growth or injuries — were nothing but “old wives’ tales.” Even so, Naomi started slowly, using a 14-pound bar instead of the typical 45-pound one. Soon it became apparent that she excelled at squatting, which is a pose in which the athlete crouches and then stands up, grasping a barbell across her upper back. The Kutin family competes “raw” — that is, without supportive clothes.
When Naomi was 8 years old, her parents brought her to her first meet, in Clearfield, Pa. She lifted 148 pounds, setting her first national record. Today, her purple-painted bedroom is dotted with medals; a shelf of trophies overflows onto a pile of stuffed animals.
The Kutins are Modern Orthodox Jews — he became religious as an adult, while she converted from Christianity. They refrain from competing or practicing on the Sabbath. First, there is the problem of driving to a meet. But even if the Kutins found a competition close enough to walk to, they still might encounter halachic quandaries. At powerlifting events, for instance, judges gauge the quality of each lift by blinking a white or red light to indicate that the maneuver either passed technical muster or didn’t. If a person judging a Saturday meet happens to be Jewish, then the Kutins would be violating Halacha by asking him or her to blink lights on the Sabbath on their behalf.
Another problem has to do with the physical act of weightlifting. The Torah prohibits carrying objects on the Sabbath to a public area from a private home. Technically, Ed Kutin said, the family could still lift weights in their basement gym. But this would interfere with the restful spirit of the Sabbath. “We try to avoid it,” he said.
At most two-day powerlifting meets, women and adolescents compete on Saturdays and men compete on Sundays. Because the Kutins won’t participate on the Sabbath, Naomi must lift at the Sunday meets, which are typically filled with muscle-bound, tattooed men. But she isn’t intimidated. “They are an unusual look for us,” Neshama Kutin said. “It’s not like you go to synagogue and see that.”
At Yeshivat Noam, Naomi, like all the girls there, wears a long, dark skirt that covers her knees, as well as shirts with sleeves that extend to just above her elbows. Naomi’s powerlifting outfit — typically a spandex onesie with a white T-shirt underneath — is a very different look. When she’s at home practicing, she augments the outfit with a 10-year-old’s flair: turquoise striped knee socks and candy-red ankle boots.
According to Neshama, Naomi’s teachers have cheered on her powerlifting, placing a newspaper clipping of one of her record-setting competitions in the hallway trophy case and playing video recordings of her competitions in school for the girls’ classes. Linda Stock, the assistant principal at Yeshivat Noam’s elementary school, said that Naomi’s athleticism has earned her the admiration of her peers. The powerlifting apparel, she added, does not clash with the school’s modesty standards.
“I don’t think it plays into anything,” she said. “We have plenty of kids who wear pants outside of school, or sleeveless shirts. When they come in, they are dressed appropriately.”
Though Naomi might be the only young Modern Orthodox female powerlifter, she is certainly not the only Jew involved in the sport. Scot Mendelson, who grew up in Brooklyn and lives in Glen Valley, Calif., holds several world records for bench pressing. In one competition, he lifted 1,030 pounds. Mendelson is the grandson of Morris Reif, the Jewish boxer known as the “Bronxville Bomber,” according to a 2005 article in the Jewish Journal.
Doug Heifetz, a rabbi at Oseh Shalom, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Laurel, Md., is another prizewinning powerlifter. He has broken local records in deadlifting, and he said his hobby makes him more approachable to congregants.
“I think our tradition calls us to balance and to wholeness, and the body is part of that,” Heifetz said. “There are a lot of references to strength and body movements as part of our spirituality.”
Powerlifting has caused Naomi to compromise one aspect of her Jewish life: summer camp. While the rest of her classmates went to sleep-away camps in the Poconos and upstate New York, Naomi chose to attend a day camp in Monsey, N.Y., so that she could compete during the summer.
Like every 10-year-old, Naomi can use some encouragement now and then. Next to the “No Fear” sign in the family gym, she has hung a list of rewards for her powerlifting goals: a cup of pudding, a bubble bath, ice cream and a visit to the aquarium store. She’s motivated, too, by a little healthy competition. Last November, the family — Naomi has a younger brother and an older sister at home — tried to best each other in a bench pressing competition.
Naturally, Naomi came in first.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at Zeveloff@forward.com or on Twitter @NaomiZeveloff
Not Your Grandmother’s Grandmothers
Russian Memoirists Offer Courageous Perspectives of Women
By Benjamin Ivry
All too often, accounts of the lives of Russian Jewish women a century ago fall into the clichés of bubbes and babushkas, simulacra of Tevye’s wife, Golde. It is salutary to remember that many forebears were women of resolve and achievement, strong personality and sophistication.
Two passionate texts by Russian Jewish women of different generations, newly available, are welcome reminders of this fact. They are unusual insofar as both authors are from privileged, highly educated backgrounds while most surviving reminiscences of growing up as a Jewish woman in Russia focus on sufferings from economic hardships and related tsoris in the shtetl. There is tsoris aplenty in these two books, and even some discussion of shtetls, but both texts enjoy a far wider scope of reference.
Readers usually enjoy adolescent diaries, as they seem either to prefigure a bright future or possess poignant irony if the precocious young diarist did not indeed live happily ever after. Despite continued renown among Russian readers, Nelly Ptachkina’s adolescent journal, which originally appeared in 1922 in Paris from [the émigré Russian Jewish publisher Iakov Povolotskii, has apparently never been translated into English. This is unfortunate, as English readers would doubtless relish the gumption and resolve of this young woman. She faced historical cataclysms in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, describing in a limpid style the devastating rise in anti-Semitic violence.
And Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia brings to the table the highly intellectual and aesthetic approach of a genuine litterateur, someone who handles language with affection and care, as she describes her own determination to acquire an education that suits her as an individual, defying the strictures of her parents. In her own way, Vygodskaia was also heroic, as an ambitious thinker and cultivated person, and she remains perhaps an even more cogent model than Ptachkina for today.
Both books are moving records of young Russian Jewish women growing up. Both have tragic conclusions. Vygodskaia, a powerful original thinker, was a proponent of early childhood education after the Russian Revolution and became a Montessori-trained teacher. Her memoir appeared in Riga in 1938, written at the request of a friend, eminent Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who was doubtless impressed by her wit and verve. In 1943, the Nazis would murder 75-year-old Vygodskaia in the Vilna Ghetto two years after her friend Dubnow shared a similarly tragic fate.
By contrast, the shortness of Ptachkina’s life was due to mischance. Against the odds, her family managed to flee post-Revolutionary Russia’s anti-Semitism and arrive safely in France. On a sightseeing trip to the foot of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, 17-year-old Ptachkina accidentally fell into a waterfall on the Swiss side of the mountain. She died from the injuries she sustained. Despite these destinies, the authors’ books are not bleak. Instead, their forthright courage and willpower have impressed many.
One reader, Joseph Kessel, wrote an essay on Ptachkina, lauding her determination to combat Russian anti-Semitism. In Kiev, her mother’s hometown, Ptachkina witnessed violent crowds who channeled their anger about post-Revolutionary difficulties into anti-Semitic pogroms. On August 22, 1919, Ptachkina noted:
The air vibrates with insults from everywhere directed at Jews: ‘Yid, yid yid!’ It’s horrible…. If I heard a single one of these people say the word “Jew” instead of “yid” I would feel profound sympathy and gratitude.
Overwhelming emotions at this time of historical crisis affected the studious teen to the point where she claimed, on September 7, 1919:
There are days when if I had any vodka, I would be capable of getting drunk. Or even take cocaine or morphine. Today, I will not write, because I want to forget myself.
Yet there is also joy and delight in Ptachkina’s record, in good part due to her love for books. Her journal begins and ends with Anton Chekhov, first with a 1918 Moscow performance of his “The Cherry Orchard.” Undaunted by the sacred aura surrounding Constantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, Ptachkina merrily mocks a moment in the play when a faithful old servant is forgotten by landowners, in response to which audience members pulled out handkerchiefs to wipe away their tears: “I find these handkerchiefs really funny,” Ptachkina confessed. Chekhov is again in her thoughts on the boat to Paris from Kiev, as seagulls hover overhead. She reflected on seagulls as poetic symbols in Chekhov’s play “The Seagull” and in the subsequent seagull logo on the stage curtain of the Moscow Art Theatre, where many of Chekhov’s plays were first performed.
On November 21, 1918, Ptachkina also experienced artistic transcendence when she went to a social dance and noted:
When dancing, I change utterly; I am no longer the same as at home or in the street. I talk endlessly, and am joyous and relaxed. I laugh and there’s something somehow special about it. My relaxation isn’t ordinary, it seems simple and spontaneous.
Her elder by 35 years, Vygodskaia shared some emotions with Ptachkina in the memoirs that she wrote about her youth. To escape from her birthplace in the provincial backwater of Bobruisk, a muddy outpost in the Pale of Settlement, Vygodskaia resolved to study European culture in St. Petersburg, leaving without obtaining the required permission from her father. Once in Petersburg, to get her father’s consent she threatened to become a midwife, a field of study not requiring parental permission. The mere threat of having an akusherke —Yiddish for “midwife” — in the family impelled her father to allow her to study any other subject. Vygodskaia explained, echoing a line from Chekhov’s play “The Three Sisters,” “I was always drawn to the big city — ‘to Moscow, to Moscow!’”
A more subtle influence of Chekhov on Vygodskaia’s writing style is her playful, teasing wit in vivid descriptions of a Gorgon-like stepgrandmother. Much like Ptachkina, the young Vygodskaia was also enchanted with dancing, on two occasions describing choreographies that express her youthful personality. Dancing at a party with her boyfriend while a pianist played a Russian folksong, Vygodskaia recalled:
I pulled out a handkerchief, lifted it high over my head, placed my hands on my hips, and started dancing, kicking out my legs, slowly at first, and then faster and faster…. Suddenly, I froze into place, as if startled by an excess of emotion. Everyone was at a loss — what had happened, why had I stopped dancing?
At another dance, Vygodskaia extended her role-playing to even higher drama.
Right at the very height of the waltz, I stopped dancing and turned white as a sheet. Then, as if I had lost all my strength, I fell against my partner’s arm and with his help, barely managed to drag myself to the sofa. I lay down motionless, with my eyes closed. I was so into my role that I didn’t even have to pretend — it really seemed as if I were done for.
Her charade having indeed alarmed everyone, Vygodskaia soon “leapt up from the sofa and confessed that it had all been a joke,” although not everyone saw the humor in her mischievous choreographic prank.
Vygodskaia also enjoyed the cultural opportunities of Petersburg, attending recitals by such famous Jewish pianists as Anton Rubinstein and Josef Hofmann. In the classes she attended, known as the Higher Women’s Courses, there was the thrill of hearing chemist Dmitri Mendeleev lecturing about his creation of the periodic table of elements, whose beauty would later inspire such authors as Primo Levi.
In addition to personal edification, Vygodskaia conveyed a genuine belief in social advancement for Jews. During one lecture about mushrooms, a botany professor named Ivan Borodin, brother of the famous composer Alexander Borodin, thoughtlessly blurted out: “Yids don’t eat this type of mushroom!” The class reacted unanimously to this use of an anti-Semitic term by silently walking out of the classroom, and Borodin was obliged to apologize.
Although this degree of academic enlightenment and sensitivity would be short-lived in Russia, as in the rest of Europe, it is a source of the vivacity and optimism in Vygodskaia’s precious memoir. Though more sober than Vygodskaia, Ptachkina’s thoughts are brightened by the happy ending of her book. Together these volumes are indispensable additions to our understanding of the lives of Russian Jewish women nearly a century ago.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
16.6.12
Death in Petrópolis
Viennese Writer Stefan Zweig Honored With Brazilian Museum
By Benjamin Ivry
Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to open in July as a museum. It will boast a library and conference hall, with performances and exhibits forthcoming. A billboard next to the museum recently proclaimed, “He’s Coming Back to Petrópolis: Here Soon,” which suggests something between a superstar’s personal appearance and a ghost returning to haunt the living. This is an apt characterization of Zweig’s continued presence on the world literary scene, dashingly elegant yet spookily posthumous.
Wikimedia Commons
Dapper Dudes: Zweig, standing, with his brother Alfred in Vienna, circa 1900.
It may seem paradoxical that though Zweig termed Brazil the “land of the future,” he also chose that country as a place to kill himself. In 1942, his suicide seemed to some harsh critics, such as philosopher Hannah Arendt, the petulant act of an “ivory tower esthete” who saw Nazism mainly as an “affront to his personal dignity and privileged way of life.” Yet Jean Améry (born Hanns Chaim Mayer), Austrian concentration camp survivor and philosopher of torture, proclaimed that Zweig’s suicide was his “greatest masterpiece.”
Between these extreme and contradictory views remains the fact that voluntary death is a major theme of Zweig’s fiction dating back to the 1920s, in such works as “Letter From an Unknown Woman,” the novella “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” and many others.
This theme was doubtless an expression of Zweig’s own highly nervous, emotionally complex temperament. In “I Loved France Like a Second Homeland: New Studies on Stefan Zweig,” a December 2011 volume from Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, literary scholar Catherine Delattre notes that art historian Benno Geiger, in a book of memoirs first published in 1958, revealed that his friend Zweig was a tormented sexual exhibitionist. Novelist Thomas Mann echoed this diagnosis in his diary in 1954, adding that although Zweig never admitted this psycho-sexual problem to him personally, “privately it was known and it could have caused him serious problems.”
Delattre suggests that a complement of this sexual hang-up is the focus on voyeurism in Zweig’s fiction, such as “Fear” and “Burning Secret.” If it is true that Zweig suffered from this sort of sexual aberration, then his longtime habit of sending each of his new books to his friend Sigmund Freud might be seen less as an amicable gesture and more as a kind of invitation to diagnose and cure.
That Zweig was also psychologically vulnerable in terms of his sexual identity seems clear from his friendship with German lawyer, author and Nazi sympathizer Erich Ebermayer. In his autobiography, “Before I Forget,” published 35 years after his death in 1970, Ebermayer describes how as a young aspiring writer he sought out the famous writer Zweig’s company. Ebermayer, whose career boomed under the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s, saw no contradiction in also enjoying a flirtatious prewar friendship with Zweig, and with considerable nerve even quoted Freud in his memoir to justify himself: “As we know from Sigmund Freud, every male friendship resonates with mostly unconscious Eros. Naturally not with sex, but with Eros.”
Describing himself as a “fresh and healthy, worshipful blond youth” at the time, Ebermayer explains that to calm his nerves on the first night of a play that Ebermayer wrote, Zweig literally held his hand during the performance. Ebermayer adds that after he published novellas in the 1920s on the theme of homosexuality, Zweig followed suit in 1927 with “A Confusion of Feelings,” which has been translated as “Confusion,” examining the ambiguous friendship between a professor and a privy counselor.
If Zweig was exploited in his relationship with Ebermayer, his friendships in the Jewish literary world of his day were more securely rewarding and lastingly genuine, for Zweig was fascinated by Yiddishkeit. Zweig’s 1929 tale, “Buchmendel,” tells of a book peddler named Jakob Mendel who sells his wares at Vienna coffeehouses around the time of World War I. As an inveterate bibliophile and collector, Zweig evidently sympathized with this protagonist, who was down on his luck like so many of Zweig’s literary friends. Earlier, in 1916, Zweig’s essay “The Tower of Babel” drew inspiration from the Old Testament to urge war-torn Europe to unite as a “heroic community” to build a project exemplifying common understanding “after the chaos of Creation.”
Zweig’s friends included some of the most notable Jews of his era, from Freud to Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. Yiddish authors such as Sholem Asch admired him, and Yiddish readers clamored for his works. “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” which appeared in Germany in 1927, was promptly published in the Forverts in a translation credited to Chaim Brakartz years before any English translation appeared. In 1929, Zweig’s biography of his friend, Nobel Prize-winning French author Romain Rolland, was published in Warsaw in a Yiddish translation by Isaac Bashevis Singer as “Romen Rolan: Der Mentsh un dos Verk.”
Given these close associations, the destruction of European Jewry during World War II took a permanent toll on Zweig’s spirit. “To Me All Friendships Are Perishable: The Joseph Roth-Stefan Zweig Correspondence,” out last October from Wallstein Verlag, notes that the day before he took his own life, the refugee Zweig said of the torments of expatriation for Roth — who died of alcoholism in 1939 — and Erwin Rieger, a translator who died in 1940, “How glad I always was for them, that they had not to go through those ordeals.”
Zweig was fully aware of his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and the limits of the psychic suffering he was prepared to accept. For this reason, perhaps, he was a preternaturally understanding friend, as many mutual acquaintances noted after Roth’s death. Zweig had published a sympathetic short study of French poet Paul Verlaine, a helpless alcoholic entirely dependent on friends for support and survival, and Zweig considered Roth to be “the quintessential poet,” both in literary talent and in this inability to cope with day-to-day life. After Roth died, Benjamin Huebsch, head of the New York publisher The Viking Press, wrote to Zweig on June 6, 1939: “It must afford you satisfaction to remember your fraternal attitude to [Roth], for you were generous in your assistance and tolerant when others would have been irritated.”
The following day, Hermann Kesten, a devoted friend of Roth’s who would edit the first collection of Roth’s letters in German, wrote along the same lines, praising Zweig for “so many acts of friendship for [Roth].” Zweig’s own obituary for Roth, published in The Sunday Times of London on May 28, 1939, is balanced between admiration for the writer and grief over the loss of a friend, with a kind of selflessness that is quintessential Zweig:
Joseph Roth was one of the really great writers of our day; his German prose has always been a model of perfect style. He wrote every page of his books with the fervor of a true poet; like a goldsmith he polished and repolished every sentence till the rhythm was perfect and the color brilliant. His artistic conscience was as inexorable as his heart was passionate and tender. A whole generation loses with him a great example, and his friends a wonderful friend.In parts, this eulogy might have been applied to Zweig himself only three years later, instead of the captious critiques by those contemporaries such as Arendt, who saw his death as a petulantly privileged cop-out. The world’s tributes today, from Brazil to Europe to America, are reflections of appreciation for his human and artistic ideals.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
Argentina agradece el apoyo internacional – y de Israel - por las Islas Malvinas
La presidenta argentina, Cristina Fernández, agradeció en un gran aviso publicado en la prensa el apoyo de "más de 70 países" al reclamo de soberanía de su país sobre las Malvinas, cuando se cumplen 30 años del fin de la guerra librada con el Reino Unido por la recuperación de las islas.
"Como presidenta de la República Argentina expreso mi más profundo agradecimiento a todos los miembros de los 90 comités Malvinas que en más de 70 países apoyan nuestro reclamo de soberanía sobre las islas Malvinas, Sandwich del Sur, Georgias del Sur y los espacios marítimos circundantes", indicó Fernández.
La mandataria aludió así a las naciones que expresaron su respaldo al reclamo argentino sobre el archipiélago, horas antes de exponer ante el Comité de Descolonización de la ONU en Nueva York.
Fernández aprovechó su visita al Comité, la primera que realiza un jefe de Estado, para reclamar al Reino Unido que cumpla la resolución 2065 de la ONU, que insta a los dos Gobiernos a abrir negociaciones para resolver la cuestión de la soberanía de las Malvinas, que están bajo dominio británico desde 1833.
Además de la mandataria, hablarán legisladores de Malvinas para exponer, según anticipó uno de ellos, Roger Edwards, que los malvinenses quieren que la ocupación se quede "tal como está".
La presentación de Fernández coincide con el trigésimo aniversario de la rendición de la tropas argentinas que el 2 de abril de 1982 recuperaron el archipiélago y se enfrentaron a Gran Bretaña en una guerra que dejó más de 900 muertos.
La mandataria llegó a Nueva York, después de que el gobierno de ocupación de las Malvinas convocara a un referendo para votar en 2013 sobre el "estatus político" del archipiélago, un anuncio sobre el que aún no se ha pronunciado el Gobierno argentino.
Por su parte, el vicepresidente Amado Boudou inauguró un mural en la localidad bonaerense de Pilar en conmemoración de la guerra de 1982.
Con un mapa de las Malvinas en su parte superior, el aviso publicado en la prensa menciona a Alemania, Angola, Arabia Saudita, Argelia, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahréin, Bélgica, Bolivia, Brasil, Bulgaria, Camboya, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dinamarca, Ecuador, Egipto, El Salvador, Emiratos Árabes, España y Estados Unidos entre los países que, según Argentina, manifestaron su apoyo.
También incluye a Filipinas, Finlandia, Francia, Grecia, Guatemala, Guyana, Haití, Honduras, Hungría, India, Indonesia, Irlanda, Israel, Italia, Jamaica, Japón, Jordania, Kenia, Kuwait, Líbano, Marruecos, México, Nicaragua, Noruega, Países Bajos, Pakistán, Palestina, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Polonia y Portugal.
La lista se completa con República Checa, República de Corea, República Dominicana, Rumanía, Rusia, Santa Sede (Vaticano), Serbia, Siria, Sudáfrica, Suecia, Suiza, Trinidad y Tobago, Túnez, Turquía, Ucrania, Uruguay, Venezuela y Vietnam.
La tensión entre Argentina y el Reino Unido se agudizó el año pasado por la decisión del Mercosur (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay y Brasil) de impedir el amarre en sus puertos de barcos con bandera malvinense.
A esto se sumó el malestar de Argentina por la presencia del príncipe inglés Guillermo en el archipiélago para cumplir una instrucción militar y el envío de un moderno destructor británico al Atlántico Sur, y enfado británico por nuevas normas legales argentinas que castigan a las empresas que hacen negocios con Malvinas.
Foto de soldados gays israelíes causa controversia
La leyenda de la foto dice «Es el Mes del Orgullo. ¿Sabía usted que las FDI tratan a todos sus soldados por igual?», e invita a compartirla.
La foto fue compartida más de 7.200 veces y tuvo más de 1.300 comentarios.
La prensa israelí calificó la imagen de «histórica», pocos días después de que se celebrara la marcha anual del Orgullo Gay en Tel Aviv.
Según informó el diario Yediot Aharonot, el ministerio de Exteriores israelí recibió con beneplácito la iniciativa, diciendo que la respuesta masiva a la foto fue «conmovedora».
El mensaje, de acuerdo con el reportaje, es claro: el ejército es un organismo progresista y liberal, que no discrimina a soldados gay ni lesbianas de ninguna manera.
Desde 1993, Israel permite a soldados abiertamente homosexuales servir en sus fuerzas armadas. Según un alto oficial israelí, esa decisión fue tomada para dar el ejemplo a los ejércitos de todo el mundo.
El diario The Times of Israel publicó una nota en la que niega que se trate de dos homosexuales. Por lo menos uno de ellos no es gay, según el periódico.
En los comentarios de los usuarios de Facebook se manifiestan opiniones ya sea de aprobación o de rechazo, aunque estos últimos están en minoría. Muchos simplemente elogian lo que perciben como la belleza de la imagen, aunque no falta quien se pregunte por qué los soldados están de espaldas.
Algunos mencionan que no importa la orientación sexual de los soldados, siempre que cumplan con su misión en el campo de batalla, pero un comentario expresa: «Estos son los mismos que matan a civiles palestinos».
En ese sentido, voces críticas acusan a Israel de proyectar una imagen de democracia y modernidad para disimular el trato que dan a los palestinos.
El humorista Shai Goldstein, después de decir que la foto es muy bonita, se pregunta: «Qué pasa si Hezbolá y Hamás lo ven? ¿Cómo quedará nuestra capacidad de disuasión? Aunque quizás incluso ellos se exciten».
Numerosos comentarios sacan a relucir dogmas religiosos, tanto del judaísmo como del cristianismo, con menciones al episodio bíblico de Sodoma y Gomorra.
No son pocos, sin embargo, los que aclaran que en Israel dos hombres tomados de la mano no quiere decir que sean homosexuales, lo mismo que si fueran dos árabes.
Ministro israelí: Reconocer genocidio armenio
El ministro de Medio Ambiente israelí, Gilad Erdán, declaró en el
Parlamento que Israel debe cambiar su política y reconocer la matanza
que sufrió el pueblo armenio en 1915 a manos del Imperio Otomano, actual
Turquía, como un acto de genocidio.
Erdán, aliado del primer ministro, Binyamin Netanyahu, aseguró, ante una pregunta de la oposición, que el Gobierno israelí debería reconocer el genocidio perpetrado contra el pueblo armenio. La dirigencia de Jerusalén siempre había rechazado esta posibilidad para no perjudicar sus relaciones con Ánkara.
Desde el año 2010, las relaciones entre ambos países se deterioraron tras el abordaje por parte de un comando especial israelí contra una flotilla que pretendía romper el bloqueo a la Franja de Gaza y en el que murieron nueve turcos. Como consecuencia, Turquía retiró a su embajador y anuló la cooperación militar.
Erdán precisó que el Gobierno israelí no cambió su postura en la tragedia armenia, pero indicó que debe apoyarse la existencia de «discusiones abiertas y profundas que analicen los datos y los hechos».
Los diputados votaron a favor de elevar la cuestión a una comisión educativa. Yigal Palmor, uno de los portavoces del ministerio de Exteriores, aseguró que la posición del Gobierno israelí sigue siendo que la cuestión debe quedar en manos de los «historiadores para que no se convierta en un asunto politico».
El presidente del Parlamento, Reuvén Rivlin, que pertenece al partido Likud de Netanyahu, declaró que «quienes están pidiendo el reconocimiento de los asesinatos no pretender presionar para conseguir intereses sino simplemente una justicia histórica».
Nino Abesadze, parlamentario del partido Kadima, aconsejó que la cuestión no se vincule con las relaciones diplomáticas con Turquía. «El genocidio está por encima de la política», indicó.
Armenia afirma que alrededor de 1,5 millones de cristianos armenios murieron en el este de Turquía durante la Primera Guerra Mundial como parte de una política genocida ordenada por el Imperio Otomano.
Los sucesivos gobiernos turcos y la propia población asegura que calificar el asunto de genocidio es un insulto. Ánkara recuerda que, en esa época, se perdieron muchas vidas en ambos bandos.
Erdán, aliado del primer ministro, Binyamin Netanyahu, aseguró, ante una pregunta de la oposición, que el Gobierno israelí debería reconocer el genocidio perpetrado contra el pueblo armenio. La dirigencia de Jerusalén siempre había rechazado esta posibilidad para no perjudicar sus relaciones con Ánkara.
Desde el año 2010, las relaciones entre ambos países se deterioraron tras el abordaje por parte de un comando especial israelí contra una flotilla que pretendía romper el bloqueo a la Franja de Gaza y en el que murieron nueve turcos. Como consecuencia, Turquía retiró a su embajador y anuló la cooperación militar.
Erdán precisó que el Gobierno israelí no cambió su postura en la tragedia armenia, pero indicó que debe apoyarse la existencia de «discusiones abiertas y profundas que analicen los datos y los hechos».
Los diputados votaron a favor de elevar la cuestión a una comisión educativa. Yigal Palmor, uno de los portavoces del ministerio de Exteriores, aseguró que la posición del Gobierno israelí sigue siendo que la cuestión debe quedar en manos de los «historiadores para que no se convierta en un asunto politico».
El presidente del Parlamento, Reuvén Rivlin, que pertenece al partido Likud de Netanyahu, declaró que «quienes están pidiendo el reconocimiento de los asesinatos no pretender presionar para conseguir intereses sino simplemente una justicia histórica».
Nino Abesadze, parlamentario del partido Kadima, aconsejó que la cuestión no se vincule con las relaciones diplomáticas con Turquía. «El genocidio está por encima de la política», indicó.
Armenia afirma que alrededor de 1,5 millones de cristianos armenios murieron en el este de Turquía durante la Primera Guerra Mundial como parte de una política genocida ordenada por el Imperio Otomano.
Los sucesivos gobiernos turcos y la propia población asegura que calificar el asunto de genocidio es un insulto. Ánkara recuerda que, en esa época, se perdieron muchas vidas en ambos bandos.
David Arquette hizo su Bar Mitzvá en el Kotel
El actor, director, productor, guionista, diseñador de modas, y
ocasionalmente un luchador libre profesional estadounidense, David
Arquette, hizo más de lo que anticipaba en su primera visita a Israel.
El astro de «Scream» llegó para grabar un segmento de su programa de turismo y terminó hacienda también su Bar Mitzvá.
Arquette, de 40 años, festejó su «inicio de la adolescencia» en Jerusalén, en el lugar más sagrado para el pueblo hebreo: el Muro de los Lamentos.
David es el más joven de los cinco hermanos Arquette, todos actores: Rosanna, Richmond, Patricia y Alexis (conocido como Robert antes cambiarse de sexo).
Aunque su padre se volvió musulmán, su madre es judía de nacimiento, con lo que, según la ley rabínica, los hermanos Arquette son todos judíos.
Mientras grababa un episodio en Jerusalén de su programa «Mile High», que se transmite por Travel Channel, Arquette asistió a un Bar Mitzvá en el que le preguntaron si él también querría celebrar el suyo.
Vestido todo de blanco, el actor incluso leyó por primera vez de la Torá y se colocó las filacterias en la cabeza y en el brazo tatuado frente al Muro de los Lamentos.
«Él estaba muy emocionado, dijo que se sentía feliz de ser parte de la cadena del pueblo judío», señaló Shmuel Rabinowitz, el rabino que ofició la ceremonia. «Me satisface mucho ver a un hombre volver a sus raíces».
Arquette, quien ha sido escurridizo durante su visita, luego escribió en su cuenta de Twitter: «Hoy hice mi Bar Mitzvá en el Kotel. Finalmente soy un hombre».
El rabino Rabinowitz dijo que Arquette estaba avergonzado por su falta de conocimientos sobre judaísmo. Nacido en una comuna en Virginia, su abuela materna era una sobreviviente del Holocausto nazi, pero su propia madre se apartó de las raíces judías.
Recientemente separado de su esposa, la estrella de «Friends» Courtney Cox, Arquette ha trabajado en series de televisión como «Buffy the Vampire Slayer» y películas como «Never Been Kissed», pero es más conocido por su papel de Dewey Riley en la franquicia de terror «Scream», que protagonizó junto a Cox.
El astro de «Scream» llegó para grabar un segmento de su programa de turismo y terminó hacienda también su Bar Mitzvá.
Arquette, de 40 años, festejó su «inicio de la adolescencia» en Jerusalén, en el lugar más sagrado para el pueblo hebreo: el Muro de los Lamentos.
David es el más joven de los cinco hermanos Arquette, todos actores: Rosanna, Richmond, Patricia y Alexis (conocido como Robert antes cambiarse de sexo).
Aunque su padre se volvió musulmán, su madre es judía de nacimiento, con lo que, según la ley rabínica, los hermanos Arquette son todos judíos.
Mientras grababa un episodio en Jerusalén de su programa «Mile High», que se transmite por Travel Channel, Arquette asistió a un Bar Mitzvá en el que le preguntaron si él también querría celebrar el suyo.
Vestido todo de blanco, el actor incluso leyó por primera vez de la Torá y se colocó las filacterias en la cabeza y en el brazo tatuado frente al Muro de los Lamentos.
«Él estaba muy emocionado, dijo que se sentía feliz de ser parte de la cadena del pueblo judío», señaló Shmuel Rabinowitz, el rabino que ofició la ceremonia. «Me satisface mucho ver a un hombre volver a sus raíces».
Arquette, quien ha sido escurridizo durante su visita, luego escribió en su cuenta de Twitter: «Hoy hice mi Bar Mitzvá en el Kotel. Finalmente soy un hombre».
El rabino Rabinowitz dijo que Arquette estaba avergonzado por su falta de conocimientos sobre judaísmo. Nacido en una comuna en Virginia, su abuela materna era una sobreviviente del Holocausto nazi, pero su propia madre se apartó de las raíces judías.
Recientemente separado de su esposa, la estrella de «Friends» Courtney Cox, Arquette ha trabajado en series de televisión como «Buffy the Vampire Slayer» y películas como «Never Been Kissed», pero es más conocido por su papel de Dewey Riley en la franquicia de terror «Scream», que protagonizó junto a Cox.
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