Russian state TV says Jews brought Holocaust on themselves

Source: Ha'aretz

TV presenter makes comment while discussing the Ukrainian uprising with a guest.

A presenter on Russia's state TV, Evelyn Zakamskaya, said on air that the Jews helped bring the Holocaust on themselves, according to a blog post published on Sunday.

Zakamskaya was responding to a guest on the show, who said it was "strange" that Jewish organizations support Maidan (the Ukrainian protest movement). "They do not realize that they are, with their own hands, closer to the Holocaust?"

To that, Zakamskaya responded: "They also advanced the first [Holocaust.]"

Blogger John Aravosis from AMERICAblog confirmed the transcript of the show with Buzzfeed's Miriam Elder, who said it was "accurate, if incomplete."


Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.581534

Today on Google: Dorothy Height, African-American and Women's rights activist

Height started working as a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department and, at the age of twenty-five, she began a career as a civil rights activist when she joined the National Council of Negro Women. She fought for equal rights for both African Americans and women, and in 1944 she joined the national staff of the YMCA. She also served as National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority from 1946 to 1957.[7] She remained active with Delta Sigma Theta Sorority throughout her life. While there she developed leadership training programs and interracial and ecumenical education programs.[7]

Height was named president of the National Council of Negro Women, a position she held until 1997. During the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Height organized "Wednesdays in Mississippi",[8] which brought together black and white women from the North and South to create a dialogue of understanding.

American leaders regularly took her counsel, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Height also encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to desegregate schools and President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint African-American women to positions in government. In the mid-1960s, Height wrote a column entitled "A Woman's Word" for the weekly African-American newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News and her first column appeared in the March 20, 1965, issue on page 8.

Height served on a number of committees, including as a consultant on African affairs to the Secretary of State, the President's Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped, and the President's Committee on the Status of Women. In 1974, Height was named to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which published The Belmont Report, a response to the infamous "Tuskegee Syphilis Study" and an international ethical touchstone for researchers to this day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Height



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A remarkable woman! I had no idea how influential she was.

Boston – Town Rallies Against Anti-Semitism At Bedford High School

Boston, MA – More than 300 Religious leaders, town and state officials, and residents gathered in Bedford Thursday to denounce recent acts of anti-Semitism in the schools and pledge their support to help make Bedford a safe and welcoming community for all cultures and races, The Boston Globe reports.

Over the last few weeks, incidents have taken place in both elementary and high schools alike in the area, including a game called “Jail the Jews,” as well as instances where anti-Semitic graffiti was spray-painted onto school walls. The graffiti includes swastikas and other such anti-Semitic materials, according to the Globe.

In other incidents, a child told her parents that a classmate said they were going to destroy her country because she is Jewish, and a Jewish child was told by a peer that she could not have a cracker because Jews didn’t believe in Jesus. Also, while discussing Christmas and Hanukkah, students said that Jews were responsible for killing Jesus.

more: http://jpupdates.com/2014/03/21/boston-town-rallies-anti-semitism-bedford-high-school/

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Some things never go out of vogue, including mocking anti-Semitism in this country and others.

'The Story of the Jews': From the beginning (This series begins Tuesday, March 25th!)

The five-part series ‘‘The Story of the Jews With Simon Schama” premieres on PBS in five one-hour installments on consecutive Tuesdays, beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday on OETA-13.


The five-part series “The Story of the Jews With Simon Schama,” a brilliant take on history, premieres at 7 p.m. Tuesday on PBS.

An intricate look at a people who endure, it will continue in one-hour installments on consecutive Tuesdays on OETA-13.

Schama, who has racked up awards for his books and documentaries on history, art and literature, talks about how he initially shied away from tackling the subject.

“I had a slight sense, a residual sense, that I was at my best when dealing with cultures not my own,” Schama says.

He let the concept percolate for a while, and the result is the series and a companion book.

more: http://newsok.com/the-story-of-the-jews-from-the-beginning/article/3945661

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Check your local listings and set your DVRs!

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ETA: related information:

http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Story-of-the-Jews-by-Simon-Schama-5339008.php

70 years after Nazi occupation, anti-Semitism still a problem in Hungary

BUDAPEST, hungary • Seventy years ago this week, shortly after the German army invaded Hungary, thousands of Jews were prodded by bayonets and swords into the freezing waters of the River Danube.

But first, they were ordered to remove their shoes so that others could walk around in them.

--snip--

Unidentified vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery this month in Tatabanya in northwest Hungary, daubing slogans such as “Stinking Jews” and “There was no Holocaust but there will be” on gravestones.

--snip--

Hungary’s far-right Jobbik Party last week held a pre-election rally in a former synagogue at Esztergom, 60 miles north of Budapest. Jewish demonstrators stood outside waving Star of David flags, calling Jobbik members “Nazis.”

entire article

Kids in 2 Boston schools play new game: Round up the Jews!

Greek god/dess gifs

Who Counts as a Holocaust Survivor?

As a writer for a Yiddish newspaper and as a Yiddish translator, I spend a lot of time working with Holocaust survivors and their writings. I’ve spent upwards of 1000 hours conducting oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and translating Holocaust testimony. Recording, preserving and sharing these stories is a large part of my day-to-day life. So although I’d hardly consider myself an expert on the topic, the Holocaust plays a much greater role in my life than it does for the average 20-something American Jew.

That’s why I was taken aback last week when I realized that I couldn’t answer a colleague’s seemingly simple question: “Who ‘counts’ as a Holocaust survivor?” The question arose after the inimitable Alice Herz-Sommer died at 110 years old on February 23. Herz-Sommer, a gifted pianist who knew Kafka in her youth, survived the Theresiendstadt concentration camp in her early 40s along with her son Raphael. Herz-Sommer’s life, musical career and indomitable spirit are recalled in the Oscar-winning film “The Lady in Number 6.”

Although Herz-Sommer was widely described as the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor at the time of her death, I believe there is an older survivor living in New York City. Dr. Alexander Imich, with whom I conducted an oral history interview in July, was born in Czestochowa, Poland on February 4, 1903. That makes him 111.

A scholar of the paranormal who is fairly estranged from his Jewish roots, Imich could still recall a few lines of a prayer in Ashkenazi Hebrew, which he had learned in a traditional Cheder. “Boruch Ato Adoneai Aloheinu Meylech Haoylum Ha…” he chanted. About forgetting the next word in the prayer, he later quipped, “Well, it was more than a century ago.”


Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/193810/who-counts-as-a-holocaust-survivor#ixzz2vAVKUpei

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This was very interesting!!!

(Jewish Group) What the Crisis in Ukraine Means for Its 70,000 Jews

It may not be the most prominent question regarding Crimea’s counter-coup against the new Ukrainian government in Kiev and Russia’s limited invasion of the peninsula, but given the country’s history it is an unavoidable one: Is it good or bad for the Jews?

The response appears to depend upon whom you ask.

Vladimir Putin, at his surreal press conference Tuesday morning, alleged that he saw a swastika armband among the anti-Russian protesters in Kiev. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations suggested that “Russia had acted to thwart threats by ultranationalists, including anti-Semites, against Russians and Russian speakers inside Ukraine,” according to The New York Times.

But leaders of Ukraine’s own Jewish community have alleged that recent anti-Semitic provocations in the Crimea, including graffiti on a synagogue in Crimea’s capital that read “Death to the Zhids,” are the handiwork of pro-Russian Ukrainians. Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, who presides over Ukraine’s Jewish Federation, signed a letter asking Russia to end its aggression, and compared the current climate in Crimea to that of pre-Anschluss Austria. Of Russia’s warnings that there were anti-Semites among the Kiev protesters, the rabbi added, “The Russians are blowing this way, way out of proportion.”

--snip--

What seems to be consistent is this: Both sides are using Ukraine’s Jewish community as a symbolic pawn, in which the credibility of the other side can be diminished by accusations of anti-Semitism. And that is remarkable. In a sense, it’s even laudatory. Babi Yar—in which, outside Kiev, over just two days Nazi Einsatzgruppen shot more than 33,000 Jews—was barely 70 years ago. 900,000 Ukrainian Jews, more than half the country’s pre-war Jewish population, were murdered in the Holocaust. This was in no small part because occupying Germans were able to secure the cooperation of homegrown anti-Semites, who had been carrying out pogroms in parts of their country that at the time were a designated region for Jews to settle in for decades preceding World War Two.

more: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116855/ukrainian-russia-jews-respond-anti-semitism-crimea-crisis

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I just made a similar observation in regards to the last paragraph's first sentences.

Fears of Anti-Semitism Spread in Ukraine

Fears of Anti-Semitism Spread in Ukraine
March 3, 2014 - 11:39am | admin
By Konrad Putzier

Could Europe witness its first pogrom against Jews since the 1940s? As Ukraine inches closer to civil war, the country’s Jewish population is growing anxious. Late last month, a Kiev rabbi made headlines when he urged his co-religionists to leave the country. A Ukrainian-born member of the U.S. Jewish advocacy group UJA Federation recently told me that his organization is monitoring the situation in Ukraine with great concern.

Cause for the anxiety is the rise of the Right Sector, a nationalist militant group crucial to President Viktor Yanukovych’s overthrow that now appears to hold great sway over the fragile Ukrainian government. Some members of the Right Sector are overt anti-Semites. Isolated beatings of Jews around Kiev’s independence square have already been reported. This weekend, the Right Sector called for its members to mobilize against a Russian intervention. The prospect of an armed, anti-Semitic mob in a largely lawless country should give everyone cause for alarm.

To Westerners, fighting for freedom and attacking Jews seem like an anachronism. But anti-Semitism has always existed alongside the Ukrainian independence movement. Throughout the 20th century, every uprising or civil war in Ukraine was accompanied by mass murder of Jews. The parallels to today are disturbing.

The first violent struggle for Ukrainian independence took place during the Russian civil war between 1918 and 1920. Following the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, Ukrainian nationalists declared an independent Ukraine, and tried to defend it against the Red Army and White troops. Anti-Semitism was widespread at the time, and all warring parties on the territory of today’s Ukraine committed pogroms. But the nationalists of the Ukrainian Directorate were especially brutal.

more: http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2014/03/03/fears-anti-semitism-spread-ukraine

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Is anyone else finding the irony/hypocrisy in some of the remarks of recent, "amusing?"