More Google Earth images of Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif

I discovered a few days ago that someone has created a wonderful overlay on the Temple Mount of the Dome of the Rock, the Al Aqsa Mosque, and many of the smaller buildings on the mount, as well as the trees. It's also possible to go inside the Dome of the Rock and see the building from that perspective as well.

It Gets Better

Ithaca College participated in the "It Gets Better" campaign initiated by Dan Savage, and I was one of the people who volunteered to appear in the Youtube video. The Trevor Project works against the epidemic of suicides by young LGBT people, which is much higher than among heterosexual youth. I participated in the project because of a series of recent suicides, some of them provoked by anti-gay bullying, and also because of the horrible gay-bashing hate crime that just occurred in New York City, where a gang called the "Latin King Goonies" set upon and tortured three gay men.



Hillary Clinton and President Obama have also just made videos for the "It Gets Better" campaign: Clinton;  Obama - It Gets Better.

Carl Paladino: our homophobic gubernatorial candidate

Carl Paladino, the rich nutcase who is running on the Republican ticket for governor in New York, just blasted forth some more hate speech - this time about gay people. He was addressing an Orthodox Jewish audience at Congregation Shaarei Chaim in Brooklyn (source: Paladino Attacks Gays in Brooklyn Speech).

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address.
And then, to applause at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.” Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

One of the rabbis accompanying Paladino is named Yechezkel Roth, who is quoted on the "Jews Against Zionism" site with virulently anti-Zionist remarks (in Hebrew) on this page: Jews Against Zionism. Rabbi Roth also participated in a demonstration this summer in New York against the building of a new emergency room for the hospital in Ashkelon (on the pretext that it was being built on a Jewish graveyard from late antiquity, which it isn't - the archaeological remains clearly show it was a non-Jewish cemetery because a pagan temple was also found there). See VosIzNeias for a photo of him at the demonstration: Anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidim Protest.

Is this a man that Carl Paladino really wants to be associated with? It certainly won't endear him to the New York Jewish community, which is mostly quite Zionist.

Another gay teenager commits suicide

When is the hatred going to end?

Pam's House Blend: Oklahoma: 19-year-old commits suicide after week of 'toxic' comments

We have a long way to go

BBC News - Serb anti-gay protesters attack political party offices

The BBC's Mark Lowen: "It has got very nasty"
Serbian police have clashed with protesters trying to disrupt a Gay Pride parade in the capital, Belgrade.Police used tear gas against the rioters, who threw petrol bombs and stones at armed officers and tried to break through a security cordon. A garage attached to the headquarters of the ruling Democratic Party was briefly set on fire, and at least one shot was fired at the building. At least 50 people were injured, most reported to be police officers. A number of people were arrested.
This was the first Gay Pride parade in Serbia since a march in 2001 was broken up in violent clashes provoked by far-right extremists. While the Gay Pride parade was moving though the city, several hundred protesters began chanting at those taking part as they tried to get close to the march.
"The hunt has begun," the AFP news agency reported them as saying. "Death to homosexuals." Reports told of gangs of skinheads roaming the streets, throwing petrol bombs and setting off firecrackers as police battled to hold them back.

When does anti-Zionism become anti-semitism?

Excellent article on "when anti-Zionism becomes anti-semitism" in Shiraz Socialist.

“Absolute anti-Zionism” can be summed up as as a one-sided hostility to Zionism (ie: Jewish nationalism) that willfully refuses to place it in its proper historical context (the pogroms, persecution and genocide of the last century), that whitewashes bourgeoise Arab nationalism and reactionary, fascistic Islamism, applies double-standards to Israel and ultimately winds up denying Israel’s right to exist, even behind pre-1967 borders....
What needs to be spelled out plainly is that this sort of stuff is anti-semitism, pure and simple. The fact that the people putting it about regard themselves as “left wing” is neither here nor there. [Dan] Glazebook (book reviewer for the Morning Star, the British newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain], significantly, also writes in what is probably the world’s leading “left” anti-semitic publication, the US magazine Counterpunch. In fact, the roots of this type of “left wing” anti-semitism are in Stalinism and the Stalinist bureaucracy’s campaigns against “Zionism” from the 1930′s through the 1952-3 “Doctors’ Plot” in the USSR and the ”anti-Zionist” campaign in Poland in 1967-68.
In fact, given their political tradition’s foul history of promoting the “Socialism of fools“, Mr Haylett and his Stalinist colleagues really aught to be more careful about their pandering to ‘absolute anti-Zionism’: or, as it is more properly called: “left wing” anti-semitism.

Good comment also:

We could call it the anti-zionism of fools, but that sounds too mild, too much like the criticism of a few blameless ignorants. They aren’t blameless and they aren’t ignorant. They are racist scoundrels. And they have infected the left with a disease that should have died in 1945, certainly by March 5, 1953.

Why are Muslims being scapegoated?

What is happening to my country? One of the things that I was proud of after the 9/11 attacks was that Muslims in this country were not targeted by the U.S. government and that despite an increase in hate crimes against Muslims in the following year, there was not generally an upsurge of hatred against Muslims. I am sure that it was uncomfortable for Muslims then - I have certainly heard and read stories that do not shed a good light on the tolerance and acceptance of America for Muslims - but there was nothing like the groundswell of open hatred that has happened this year. No one was threatening to burn Qur'ans in the wake of 9/11. President Bush made a conspicuous point of saying that we should not blame all Muslims for the actions of a few. The Republican Party did not scapegoat Muslims en masse - perhaps because of the President's strongly expressed views.

Now, we have leaders of the Republican Party (for example, Newt Gingrich) openly engaging in anti-Muslim demagoguery that reminds me of the rhetoric historically used against Jews by anti-Semites. The former President Bush has not spoken up to reprove members of his party.

And ordinary Muslims and people from the Middle East are being turned into scapegoats for no reason whatsoever - as if they are to blame for all of the ills in American society.

The New York Times today published a very affecting article about the Muslim prayer room that used to exist at the World Trade Center before the 9/11 attacks: Muslim Prayer Room Was Part of Life at Twin Towers.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.

Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.

“Iftar was my best memory,” said Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”

Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdoul-Karim Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

The people quoted in this article are good, honest people who deserve to live as securely as anyone else of any religion in this country. Why can't they?

Sima Schlossberg and her family in Jelgava

I just found another resource to research the Jews of Latvia - the Latvian Names Project. It is an attempt to do for all of the Jews of Latvia what Edward Anders and his co-workers were able to do for Liepaja - identify the fates of Jews who lived in Latvia before the Second World War. In 1935 the Latvian census recorded 93,479 Jews living in Latvia.

I looked up the name of my relative from Jelgava, Latvia - Sima Schlossberg. She came up on the list, and so did the names of her family - names that she doesn't refer to in her letters to my grandfather. Her sister's name was Miriam, and she was born on August 5, 1909. Sima herself was born on November 27, 1911. Their parents' names were Itzik Ruben and Esther Raschel. Only the possible fate of Miriam Schlossberg is mentioned - in the Riga Ghetto.

Looking back in correspondence from March and April of 2004 (with Miriam's daughter and with a cousin of Sima's), I discover, however, that I do know the fates of the people in the family. Sima escaped from Riga in 1941 with her parents first to Russia and then to Uzbekistan. Her sister Miriam was already living there because she had fled earlier. Sima's father Itzik died in 1942 from hunger. The two sisters and their mother survived the war. In 1942, Miriam married a man named Mikhail Golod, and her daughter was born in 1943 in Bukhara. They returned to Riga in 1945. Sima worked as a bookkeeper, and in 1955 was married to a man named Nohum Bruk and moved with him to St. Petersburg. She died there in 1988, leaving no children behind. Miriam died in 1980 and her mother Esther Raschel died in 1984 at the age of 100.

I'm going to have to write to the Latvian Names Project and give them information on all of these people.

Websites on journeys to Liepaja

A number of other people have made a similar journey to Liepaja to see where their ancestors lived. I just found a website created by Arturo and Marc Porzecanski about their visit to Liepaja (among other places in eastern Europe) in 2002: Our trip. The direct link to the page on Liepaja is: Our Trip to Liepaja.

Brian Friedman created the Welcome to Avaslan website about his family in eastern Europe, including Liepaja. Like me and the Porzecanskis, he found the house where his relatives in Liepaja had lived. He also has a page on the Killing Fields of Skede and photographs of the memorials there.

Are we losing our minds over Cordoba House?

Good grief! What is happening to this country? Howard Dean, of all people, says that Cordoba House should be built somewhere else. First Harry Reid and now Howard Dean. Have they lost their minds? This is nothing but the rankest political cynicism on their part. It seems that we have to rely on Republicans like Michael Bloomberg and Ted Olson to uphold any honor for this country. (And remember - Ted Olson lost his wife on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11/01).

For a concurring opinion, see Peter Beinart, America has disgraced itself.

See also Michael Kinsley, Cordoba House, Charles Krauthammer, and the First Amendment.

He writes:

Muslim American citizens have a constitutional right to build a religious and cultural center anywhere in this country that Christians or Jews may build one. This is so clear and obvious that opponents of the planned Muslim center near Ground Zero usually concede or avoid the point. Then they say that the center should not be built at this location anyway. I guess they mean that these Muslims should give up their right voluntarily--or under duress.

And why do they say this? Well, the two obvious possibilities are bigotry and political opportunism. Maybe they associate this Muslim center with the perpetrators of 9/11. That would be bigotry, since the only real connection is that both are Islamic. Or maybe, in the case of Republican politicians and right-wing commentators, it is simply a matter of taking advantage of a political opportunity that has fallen into their laps.

Both of these reasons are fairly unattractive. Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn't bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I've heard or read.

I also heard a good interview today with Irwin Kula at Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! (I am generally not a fan of Amy Goodman, but she sometimes has really good interviews with people the mainstream press doesn't pay attention to). He's a rabbi who is the head of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, also known as Clal. Here are some of his words:

RABBI IRWIN KULA: ....But I actually think the distinction between the right to build and the wisdom to build is a very, very, very dangerous distinction. It actually is pernicious, in a way. And I would have liked the President to say something like this: "I reject the premises of the question, because I know where that question is coming from. That question is coming from already a premise that there are these terrorists and these American Muslims, and they’re equivalent. And therefore, you’re asking me about the wisdom of American Muslims, who have been in New York for a long time in a mosque that was twenty—that was within twelve blocks for the last twenty-seven years. And the very fact of the question of the wisdom is actually to presume suspicion. And so, I reject the question. There’s only two—there’s only one wisdom I care about: the wisdom of the Constitution, I care about, and the wisdom of distinguishing between our genuine enemies and American citizens."

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Rabbi Kula, let me ask you about the statement of the Anti-Defamation League. It published a statement opposing the Park51 project, saying, quote, "Ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment," they said, "building an Islamic center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right." The ADL national director Abraham Foxman later defended this position on CNN.

ABRAHAM FOXMAN: Our position basically was an appeal to the imam and his supporters. If you want to heal, if you want to reconcile, is this the best place to do it? Should you do it in face—in the face of those who are saying to you, most of the victims, families of the victims, the responders, are saying, "Please don’t do it here. Please don’t do it in our cemetery." I believe, on this issue, the voices, the feelings, the emotions of the families of the victims of the responders, I think take precedent maybe over even the Mayor’s.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Kula, your response?

RABBI IRWIN KULA: I mean, I’m just deeply disappointed, and I was, you know, quoted as saying I think the ADL should be ashamed of itself. I think the sad thing here is that Abe Foxman, since 9/11, has been one of the most important advocates to ensure that there was not defamation and not prejudice for Muslims, and the shame here is that he actually knows Daisy and knows Imam Feisal for a long time. And so, what I think what we really have here is tremendous political pressure.

AMY GOODMAN: And Daisy is Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal—

RABBI IRWIN KULA: And Daisy Khan, I’m sorry, yeah, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And what we have here is tremendous political pressure. And I’m sure the stories are going to come out in the next months of the kinds of pressures that were put on somebody like Abe. And you can see the torturous kinds of statement that he had to make about the feelings, I mean, which—anguish, and I think we need to say something, that the anguish of people does not automatically translate into public policy. And sometimes anguish and really, really personal suffering needs to be disconnected from public policy, because anguish doesn’t allow us to abandon rationality. Anguish doesn’t allow us to abandon kind of first principles about what our country stands for.

And I had two friends who died in the World Trade Center. I was very involved in this for a long time. And to be able to use the sensitivities of people to really—to really stoke fear, there’s something very cynical about that. And there isn’t such a thing as the sensitivities of 9/11 families. There are a lot of different 9/11 families, and there are not only 9/11 families who lost directly people, but there are 9/11 families who were forced out of their homes for years in the neighborhood. So, what do we mean by the "the feelings of 9/11 families"? These are abstractions used to actually stoke fear in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about Imam Rauf, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is headed, by the way, on a State Department mission for two weeks to the Middle East.... How do you know him?

RABBI IRWIN KULA: Well, kind of in the interfaith work that we’ve been doing over the last decade. I was one of the readers of his book, What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision of Muslims in America. We were in Australia recently, at the World Parliament of World Religions. You know, in the interfaith world, there aren’t that many people working at the cutting edge of interfaith. That is what’s so crazy about this story. Imam Feisal has been at the cutting edge of whatever we mean by "moderate Islam." I mean, those words weren’t even used until very, very recently. This is a guy who, well before 9/11, he had two books that are very, very important—Islam: A Search for Meaning and Islam: A Sacred Law. These are things that people need to read. And it’s so easy to take one comment out of context. Any of us who have been in the media, any one of us who have been interviewed, you can take a statement and turn someone into a radical and turn someone into a terrorist. This guy has been at the highest echelons—State Department, FBI. He has spoken in the Aspen Institute. He’s spoken in Washington Cathedral. This is—I mean, it’s really crazy.

And that’s another part of the story that’s very scary. I mean, the community board, before anything, voted this 15-0. There was an amazing conversation. In fact, there was a request from—of Daisy Khan: Could you put a 9/11 memorial inside of the—of what is now Park51? And he said, "Of course. We’re planning on doing that." And it was—this got stoked by a very small group of people, and then—what I would say is an irresponsible national leadership, whether it’s Gingrich and Palin, and then a certain element of the media. And what’s very scary is, what was a local issue that was—that was a non-issue. This is a group of people, led by Imam Feisal, that has been ten blocks from there for the last twenty-seven years. This is a complete non-issue. And so, what it really says is, what’s going on in America?

What makes a place holy?

Charles Krauthammer begins his column decrying the building of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan with these words:

A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).
When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there -- and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated.

I understand why a place that people believe was "visited by the miraculous or the transcendent" is considered holy - Krauthammer might have given the example of the Ka'ba in Mecca as well - but why does the shedding of blood visit sanctity upon a place? He conflates several different circumstances here.

Gettysburg is the site of a historic battle of the American Civil War - those who died there were soldiers fighting for a cause they believed in. Thousands died in the fighting. For Krauthammer, and probably for many Americans, the place is made holy by the nobility and sacrifice of the soldiers who died there. But are all battlegrounds sacred? What about the battlegrounds of the First World War? Guadalcanal? The Ardennes Forest (where the Battle of the Bulge was fought)? Khe Sanh? Fallujah? The battlegrounds where Iranians and Iraqis fought each other in the 1980s?

Were those who died at Auschwitz martyrs? Emil Fackenheim has argued that before the Nazi assault upon Jews, Jewish martyrdom was something that could be chosen. Jews in the Middle Ages who were confronted with the choice of converting to Christianity or being killed, and chose to die, were in fact martyrs, witnessing to their devotion to God. (The English word martyr, taken from the Greek, originally referred to a witness).

But the Jews who were taken to Auschwitz were not confronted with any kind of a choice - they were killed. Nothing a Jew could do could dissuade the Nazis from killing him or her, since the Nazis thought of Jewishness as a racial, not a religious identity. Jews who had converted to Christianity were killed as Jews at Auschwitz (and other death camps). This is why Edith Stein died there, even though she had converted to Christianity and become a nun. Catholics regard her as a martyr for her faith, but I don't think many Jews would.

Krauthammer also says that Auschwitz was sanctified by the "indescribable suffering of the innocent." I certainly think it is more accurate to call those who died there innocent victims, rather than martyrs, since they had no choice about their fate.

And he also says that the World Trade Center site is "hallowed ground" because of the suffering and death of the victim on September 11, 2001. Again, these people were offered no choice - Osama bin Laden did not appear before them and give them the choice of martyrdom or conversion to Islam. They too were innocent victims.

So Krauthammer, and probably many other people, would consider the Gettysburg battleground, Auschwitz (and other concentration and death camps), and Ground Zero "hallowed ground" because of the deaths that occurred in those places.

But can death sanctify a place? In Jewish tradition, death is the greatest source of impurity. If one touches a dead human body, or enters a house or other enclosed space where there is a body, one becomes impure. In biblical times, this meant that the impure person could not offer a sacrifice in the Temple, or even enter the area of the Temple. According to the Torah, the ashes of the red heifer are needed to purify people from the taint of death. And since we no longer possess those ashes, we are all tainted with the impurity of the dead. There are still vestiges of this belief in Jewish ritual practices. Men who are kohanim generally do not enter graveyards. After visiting a graveyard, people will wash their hands. Jews place graveyards outside cities or other areas where people live. The fact that we are tainted with the impurity of the dead means, to many religious Jews, that we should not set foot on the Temple Mount, in accordance with the purity laws of the Torah, which state that the area is still holy.

Auschwitz, the other death camps, and many other places in Europe once occupied by the Nazis are full of mass graves of Jews and others murdered by the Nazis. Many of these places have, in fact, been forgotten. During the Soviet era, in the USSR, their character was distorted by Soviet memorial practices, which did not mention Jews as victims even when all or a majority were in fact Jews.

If the location of a mass grave has been suppressed or forgotten or distorted, is it still sacred ground? How would we know that it was sacred? Krauthammer says that Ground Zero is "hallowed ground" because it "belongs to those who suffered and died there." In this formulation, a forgotten mass grave somewhere in eastern Europe is hallowed ground because it belongs to those who died there. But how would the rest of us know this, if the memory has been lost?

This is something that has bothered me for a long time. It has always seemed to me that it would be right and proper that such a place - a mass grave, the site of a concentration camp or a massacre, places where great suffering and death have occurred - would announce itself, even if we did not know what happened there, so that when we came upon it we would know that something evil had happened there, that the land itself would be marked by a psychic scar perceptible to human beings who pass by. But this is not true. When people do not know that a particular place was where a massacre happened, or that a mass grave is located there, or that once there stood a concentration camp - the land itself does not cry out to us. Unlike the biblical story of Cain, the voice of our brothers' and sisters' blood does not cry out to us from the ground. A place cries out to us only when we know what happened there and mark it as a site of death.

But does mass death caused by great human evil make a place holy? When I think of what happened at the Skede dunes north of Liepaja, Latvia, along the Baltic Sea, it is hard for me to consider this place holy. For me, it is cursed. (Again, this is a human perception, since the ground itself does not cry out to us). What the Nazis and their collaborators did there (and in many other places) to innocent people are among the most dreadful things that human beings have ever done to other people. As Krauthammer says, the suffering of those who died there is indescribable. How could the wicked actions of the perpetrators or the horrible suffering of the innocent make this place holy?

When I was there a couple of weeks ago, I didn't know exactly where the mass graves are, nor does the monument there specify where they are (unlike the memorial at the Rumbula Forest in Riga). The place itself did not speak to me, only the inherited knowledge of what happened there, which has been preserved in human memory.

So is Ground Zero holy ground? Is it hallowed by the suffering and deaths of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack? Or is it cursed by the evil of the actions committed by the Al Qaeda hijackers? The answer depends upon one's notion of what makes a place holy. And what should then happen is determined by what one thinks is appropriate to a holy or a cursed place.

For me, the Islamic center that Imam Rauf proposes to build two blocks from the World Trade Center site does not violate the sanctity of Ground Zero - if in fact it is a holy place, sanctified by the deaths of the victims of the attacks. Aside from the constitutional question of whether the government has any right to prevent an Islamic center from being built there (which it does not, as long as it accords with the zoning regulations of New York City), the place that he proposes to build is intended to build bridges among people of different religions, not separate them or incite further hatred. It seems to me that Cordoba House is exactly the kind of center that should be built close to Ground Zero - because what we need to learn is how to live together with each other in peace.

Good news

It's nice to have some good political news, two days in a row - the California anti-gay marriage amendment overturned and Elena Kagan confirmed as Supreme Court Justice.

Let's not have a new Lebanese war

Hopefully this is NOT the beginning of new war: Two Lebanese soldiers killed in clash with IDF on northern border. The report is pretty confusing - it's hard to know what exactly happened.

Israel's northern border erupted on Tuesday as an Israel Defense Forces tank exchanged fire with a Lebanese army position, killing two Lebanese soldiers, in what appeared to be the most serious military confrontation since Israel's month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006.

The Lebanese army confirmed that two of its troops had been killed when Israeli forces fired on a vehicle in which they were traveling, setting it on fire and wounding another.

In Lebanon, security sources said that Israeli shells fired at the southern Lebanese border village of Aadassi hit a house, wounding two - a soldier and a civilian.

Lebanese troops responded with artillery fire, Lebanese press reports said, while eyewitnesses said fire had broken out in two buildings in the village.

"It started when the Israelis wanted to cut a tree down inside Lebanon," one security source in Lebanon said. "The Lebanese army fired warning shots at them and they responded by shelling.

Hebrew article, which seems to be more comprehensive: Exchanges of fire between the IDF and the Lebanese Army.

Ynet has more details:

Fire in the north: A day after rockets were fired at Eilat, loud explosions were reported on the northern border as Israeli and Lebanese forces engaged in massive exchanges of fire.

Security sources and witnesses in Lebanon said three Lebanese soldiers and a local journalist were killed in the clash.

The fire erupted after IDF soldiers performing routine operations in a border-area enclave within Israeli territory came under fire. Northern residents have reportedly been ordered to enter secured rooms and bomb shelters. Many locals informed Ynet of loud explosions heard in the region....

Lebanese sources also reported exchanges of fire between Israeli and Lebanese forces. According to one report, the Lebanese Army fired at an Israel tank.

The IDF fired four rockets that fell near a Lebanese army position in the village of Adaysseh and the Lebanese army fired back," a security official in the area told AFP. According to eyewitnesses, the shells hit a Lebaense house. He said one Lebanese soldier and one civilian were wounded.

A Lebanese army spokesman said the clashes erupted after Israeli soldiers attempted to uproot a tree on the Lebanese side of the border."The Israelis began to fire and we responded," he said....

Notably, the clash erupted after Israeli forces were operating in a border-area enclave in Israeli territory. The army recently said such operations were necessary in order to prevent Hezbollah from taking advantage of vulnerable spots in the region. "If we don't operate within the enclaves on the northern border, we will create a dangerous vacuum that Hezbollah might use," a senior officer at the northern border said recently.

Touring Copenhagen - Resistance Museum

I arrived in Copenhagen Friday afternoon from Tartu, via Riga (which was a little nerve-wracking, because I had left one piece of luggage in the luggage storage room in the airport, and I had to figure out how to get it on as hand luggage without paying an enormous sum of money to Air Baltic, which allows only one piece of checked luggage - but I did get it on without having to pay). I was pretty tired, so I didn't go anywhere once I got here, but I went out yesterday morning. The first challenge was figuring out how to buy a metro ticket at the closest stop - there were directions in English, but they weren't very clear. With the help of several patient Danish people, I bought the ticket and headed for my first destination, the harbor, where I was going to take a harbor tour.

It was really a beautiful day - not too hot, with a nice breeze, and it was great to be out on the water. We sailed into the harbor and on several canals (I hadn't realized before this that Copenhagen has canals), passing lots of other tourist boats doing the same thing.

People relaxing at the water's edge, with the Amalieborg castles behind them.

When we got back, I was hungry and had lunch in an Italian restaurant (of which Copenhagen appears to have an abundance). I then walked over to the Museum of the Danish Resistance (during WWII), which turned out to be quite an affecting museum. It covered the whole period from the German invasion in April 1940 to the liberation in May 1945, including the rescue of the Danish Jews from Nazi deportation. The story is really quite amazing. Almost all were ferried to Sweden by the Danish resistance; only about 450 were captured and sent to Terezin, and of those, about 400 survived.

The museum was divided into several sections, starting with a general introduction to Nazism. While some of the exhibits were photographs or facsimiles, many were authentic artifacts of the time period. One of the first items that I saw, to my shock, was the label below from a canister of Zyklon B, which had been found by a Dane in the hold of a sunken German ship.

The next part of the museum was devoted to the first stage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark – accommodation to the wishes of the occupiers. Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, and the Danish government quickly capitulated. The Germans ruled Denmark through a Danish government coalition, so that full Nazi policies were not implemented (for example anti-Jewish legislation). This included Denmark furnishing Germany with many of its food needs during the war, as well as favorable trade agreements for Germany. The next item illustrates this trade.

These are toy figures of Hitler and Mussolini, purchased in a Copenhagen store in 1943. It had somehow never occurred to me that little figurines of fascist dictators were made – presumably for children to play with!

This is one of the German ENIGMA code machines, which was used by the German Navy in Esbjerg, Denmark.





  The Communist Party was not outlawed in Denmark until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. At that point, the Germans told the Danish government to intern the leaders of the Danish communists, which they did. In November 1942 about 250 were sent to the Horseroed camp, which was run by the Danish police, not by the Nazi Gestapo (later on it was taken over by the Nazis).

A drawing from the internment camp by one of the inmates, Knudaage Larsen.

The next part of the museum was devoted to various types of Danish resistance to German rule in the early years of the occupation. An underground press flourished with newspapers produced by various factions of the Danish resistance. The picture above is of the printing press used to print a newspaper called “Frit Danmark,” which was a collaboration between Communists and Conservatives.

The Danish resistance was in close communication with the British by various methods, including illegal telegraph machines. The picture below shows a reconstruction of a room with equipment used by a telegraphist.

The Jews of Denmark were untouched by German persecution until the Danish government resigned in the summer of 1943, in the face of German decrees that they could not accept. This meant that Denmark was now under direct German rule, and they quickly organized for the arrest of the entire Danish Jewish community on October 1-2 (Rosh Hashanah). The Danish underground found out about the German decree, and through quick action, managed to save almost the entire community by ferrying them to Sweden.

On the right is a model of one of the boats used to ferry Jews to Sweden.

About 500 Jews, however, did not manage to get away – they were captured and sent to Terezin. Most of them survived the war without being deported to Auschwitz because of pressure exerted by the Danish government and aid sent by the Danish Red Cross.

(I visited Terezin in the summer of 2005 when I visited Prague - I wrote about it here).

This is a revolting German propaganda poster [from 1942] about Jews being forced to wear the yellow star. The text reads:

The cat cannot change his spots!

The leading English newspaper "Daily Mail" reported:

"The participation of Jews in breaking British wartime economic legislation has caused Judaism and Jewish names to be ostracized in England, said the Chief Rabbi Dr. J. Hertz in a London synagogue."

With these accusations, the rabbi certainly wanted to warn his racial comrades to greater caution in their dark black marketing business, so that the English people would not recognize whose lice are in the fur. His efforts, however, are likely to be in vain. So are the Jews. First they chase the people into war, and while the soldiers of those nations fight and bleed, they make business out of the war, pushing and cheating and filling their filthy pockets at the expense of their host peoples. In Germany the blame was pinned on them. We have separated them from the German national community and they are marked with a yellow Star of David.

Everyone knows: Whoever wears this sign is an enemy of our people.

A jacket belonging to one of the Danish Jews imprisoned in Terezin. 481 Danish Jews were imprisoned in Terezin, of which 51 died there. The rest were sent to Sweden at the end of the war.










When I came out of the museum I was feeling sad at the fate of some of the resistance fighters (who were captured and executed by the Nazis), and sat for a little while thinking and looking out over a stream. I then walked towards what turned out to be a fort, but on the way encountered a statue erected after the war, dedicated to those who had fallen in the war. (It's below).

Our fallen
in Danish and allied war service
1940-1945
Raised by the Danish people

Sacred cats in Copenhagen

I just spent the day visiting museums in Copenhagen, including the ruins underneath the Christansborg castle, the Jewish museum, and the National Museum. At the last museum, I headed up to the third floor to see the Egyptian and classical galleries, and found some attractive displays. There were some charming little cat statues in one of the Egyptian galleries, dedicated to the goddess Bastet.

Sekhmet, sun and war goddess, from ca. 1403-1365, Luxor, Egypt

These two images are the enormous head and foot of a lion found at Hama, Syria - they guarded the royal citadel (ca. 900-720 BCE).

Religious freedom is for all Americans

The Anti-Defamation League has just come out against the plans for a Muslim community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

“The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.”

Jeffrey Goldberg writes:

1) The organization behind the project, the Cordoba Initiative, is a moderate group interested in advancing cross-cultural understanding. It is very far from being a Wahhabist organization;

2) This is a strange war we're fighting against Islamist terrorism. We must fight the terrorists with alacrity, but at the same time we must understand that what the terrorists seek is a clash of civilizations. We must do everything possible to avoid giving them propaganda victories in their attempt to create a cosmic war between Judeo-Christian civilization and Muslim civilization. The fight is not between the West and Islam; it is between modernists of all monotheist faiths, on the one hand, and the advocates of a specific strain of medievalist Islam, on the other. If we as a society punish Muslims of good faith, Muslims of good faith will join the other side. It's not that hard to understand. I'm disappointed that the ADL doesn't understand this.

What *is* in Tartu?

I just spent a week in Tartu, Estonia, at a conference on biblical studies. I gave a paper on whether there were women mystics in early Judaism, and went to lots of other interesting papers. I also went on a couple of tours - one of a series of communities along Lake Peipsi (which forms the border between Estonia and Russia - I had hoped I could take photos of Russia on the other side of the lake, but it's actually quite large, so I couldn't fulfill my desire of saying that I could see Russia from Estonia, unlike Sarah Palin who claimed that she could see Russia from Alaska), and another in and around Tartu itself.

For those of you who may not know where Estonia is (no need to be embarrassed, I checked on the map to be sure exactly where it is), it's the northernmost country of the Baltic states, and it's right next to Russia. From 1940-1991 it was part of the Soviet Union (along with Latvia and Lithuania it was swallowed up by the Soviets as a result of the pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany that agreed to divide the Baltic states and Poland between them). Then, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, it became an independent country again. It's also a member of the EU. There's quite a bit of anti-Russian sentiment there, as a result of this history.

The tour that I took on the Sunday before the conference started first went to several small villages along Lake Peipsi that are inhabited by the "Old Believers" - a sect that split off from Russian Orthodoxy in the 17th century, when the official church enacted a series of reforms that the Old Believers rejected. The reaction against them was extremely violent - Old Believers were persecuted, their priestly leadership was murdered, their churches were burned down - so as a result many of them left Russia for other safer locations, including Estonia. They managed to survive through the years of communist rule, and the communities still exist. I just looked up the term on the internet, and discovered that there are communities of Old Believers even in Oregon!

We went inside an Old Believer church, and it was really beautiful inside. (Unfortunately, they didn't want us to take photos, so I can only describe it). The inside was painted with bright colors, and the front of the church was covered with beautiful icons, vividly painted. One of the women members of the church spoke to us about the religion and tried to explain the differences between the Old Believers and other kinds of Russian Orthodox, but frankly I didn't really understand it. She also talked about how for the most part women are the religious leaders of the community, even though according to their theology men should be - because there are so few men now left who are priests.

We then got back on the bus and went to a little museum of Old Believer life, where another woman told us about Old Believer life, including some very interesting rules that she had grown up with. When her grandmother was alive, the family would never eat with anyone who was not also an Old Believer - if a stranger came to the house, that person had to eat on separate dishes. Also, if anyone in the family went away to work far away, and then came back, he had to go through a two-week period of eating on separate dishes as well before he would be considered pure enough to eat with the family.

The rest of the tour consisted of a visit to a castle (actually, not much of a castle, it was from the 19th century, built by a German baron), where we had lunch, and then a visit to the shore of Lake Peipsi to watch the "christening" of a boat built out of local reeds. This consisted of someone reciting something in Estonian, which of course we didn't understand, then pouring some rum over the boat, and then passing around the rum to whoever was interested in drinking. Unfortunately, we didn't bring our bathing suits, so there was no possibility of taking a dip in the lake - and it was very hot!

We then returned to Tartu, rather sated with Estonian tourism, and got down to the serious business of biblical scholarship the next day.

On Tuesday afternoon I went on a walking tour of Tartu with the same guide who had taken us to Lake Peipsi, and the tour had a very interesting ending. She showed us some of the main buildings of the University of Tartu, where the conference took place, brought us to the town hall in front of which is a statue of two students kissing, had us slog up the hill behind the university where we saw the university observatory and the supreme court of Estonia, which is headquartered in Tartu, and then back to the main university building where we had started. At that point one of the people on the tour asked the guide about the Soviet occupation - because the guide was uniformly negative about the period of Soviet rule.

The guide answered and then a woman named Irena, who was also on the tour, interrupted her - saying that she had studied at the University of Tartu in the 1970s because it was one of the few universities in the USSR where Jews were freely admitted (she herself now lives in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, but she grew up in Leningrad). She also then mentioned one of the luminaries of the University of Tartu who had taught there for many years - a Jewish scholar of semiotics named Yuri Lotman who founded the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. He was from St. Petersburg/Leningrad and was unable to find work in Russia because of antisemitism, and so began teaching in Tartu in 1950.

Irena also talked about another Jewish scholar at the university in the 1930s named Lazar Gulkowitsch. The University of Tartu established a chair in Jewish Studies in 1934, and he took up the position. He was killed when the Nazis invaded in 1941. (Many of the Jews of Estonia escaped the Nazis by going east into the Soviet Union, but about a thousand didn't, among them Gulkowitsch). A scholar at the conference, Anu Pölsdam of the University of Tartu, gave a paper about Gulkowitsch that I'll write more about here.

It was interesting to see the guide then backtrack on her uniformly negative view of the Soviet period. I guess this was just a taste of the internal politics of Estonia.

Copenhagen - blowing in the wind

I just spent a week in Tartu, Estonia, going to the international Society of Biblical Literature conference, and I have now arrived in Copenhagen for a couple of days of relaxation before returning to the U.S. I'm on the 12th floor of my hotel, so when I looked out over the city from the window, I had a great few of roofs, trees, church spires, and the like - and on the horizon, a whole row of wind turbines actively spinning! I really like the way wind turbines look - in my opinion, they add interest to a landscape, rather than intruding on it (as those opposed to Cape Wind have argued). So, forthwith, some photos of Copenhagen's wind turbines:

From Wind turbines in Copenhagen

From Wind turbines in Copenhagen

And by comparison, a photo I took a few years ago of wind turbines on a ridge on the Golan Heights:

From Wind turbines in Copenhagen

And, in case you've forgotten, a photo of the wind turbines on the way to Liepaja:

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Libau and Skede - remembrances of the past

As promised, here is my report on my day in Liepaja. After this, I'll write up my visit to Tartu, Estonia, at the international Society of Biblical Literature conference, which is wrapping up tomorrow. On Friday, I'm flying to Copenhagen for two days, which I intend to spend going to museums and enjoying myself, and then on Monday, I'm going back to Ithaca, at long last.

My visit to Liepaja occurred largely because Ieva Gundare, my guide, urged me to do it after I had written her about my family in Liepaja. I’m very grateful that she hired the driver and the other guide (in Liepaja), came to Liepaja with me, and translated what Sandra, the other guide, said in Latvian. Ieva also generously made sandwiches and brought fruit to eat for all of us.

The day began when she came to my hotel in Riga, and we drove to Liepaja, about a two hour drive from Riga. About a half an hour before we arrived in Liepaja, we passed by a large wind farm – many wind turbines turning in the wind.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

When we came into Liepaja, we went to a hotel in the center of the city and met the local guide, Sandra. The first place we drove to was the Skede dunes, about fifteen miles/kilometers north of the city along the Baltic sea. This is the place where the Nazis killed thousands of people, Jews, Latvians, and Soviet prisoners of war. It is likely where Dobra Falkon, the wife of Mottel-Mordchai Falkon, my great-great uncle, was killed with thousands of other Jews in mid-December 1941.

There are two memorials at Skede – one set up by the Soviets, which says that 19,000 people were killed there (it does not mention Jews specifically at all), and another recently built by the local Liepaja Jewish community, with support from the Latvian government and groups in Latvia, Israel, and the U.S. This memorial repeats the assertion that 19,000 people were killed at Skede, but this figure is incorrect – it’s much too large. Edward Anders and Vladimir Bans erected a plaque nearby (in Russian, Latvian, and English) that more accurately states who was killed at Skede.

Memorial site for victims of Nazi occupation. Here in the Skede dunes were murdered from 1941 to 1945 3640 Jews, including 1048 children ~ 2000 Soviet prisoners of war ~ Latvian civilians including people who helped Jews and prisoners, and resisted the occupiers. We honor the memory of our relatives and all other victims who lie here. UNITED IN DEATH. Donated by Liepaja Jews Edward Anders and Vladimirs Bans

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Anders and Bans put up this plaque because the other one only mentions Jewish victims of the Nazi murderers, at the insistence of the local Jewish organizers of the memorial. Anders and Bans felt that it was important to honor and remember all who were killed there, Jews and non-Jews. Anders wrote, “We and many fellow Liepaja Jews do not understand the mentality of people who refuse to honor non-Jewish victims—including rescuers of Jews and Soviet POWs—who opposed the Nazis and were killed by them.” I cannot help but think that this division, and the refusal to acknowledge the suffering and deaths of those who together with Jews opposed the Nazis, is another sign of the persistence of the hatred that the Nazis sowed in this part of the world.

The memorial at Skede is built in the shape of a giant menorah. At the entrance there are two big triangular plaques, one with a biblical verse on it, the other acknowledging all those who made the memorial possible. At the end of each branch of the menorah, next to the dunes, is a stone with another verse engraved on it (seven in all). The following two photographs are of the introductory plaques.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

The biblical verse is from the book of Lamentations 1:12 – “May it not come upon you, all who pass on the way; look and see if there is any pain like my pain which is done to me!”

The next pictures are of the dunes and the sea. It is a lonely spot. The last sight for those who were killed here was of the sea.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

This is one of the stone pillars with biblical verses at the ends of the menorah branches. It is inscribed with a verse from Lamentations 3:19 – “Remember my suffering and my oppression, gall and wormwood.”

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

The next place we went to was inside Liepaja, at another location where Jews were murdered during July 1941 – near a lighthouse that is currently inside an army camp. There is a memorial plaque on a wall outside in Latvian and Russian, underneath an older Soviet memorial that doesn’t mention Jews. I’ve tried to translate the Latvian via Google translate, so it’s not exact:

Stop people! [addressed to passersby]

At this place on July 27, 1941 in Liepaja

fascist murders took place during the Jewish Holocaust

It’s possible that my great-great uncle, Mottel-Morchai Falkon, was killed here in July 1941. The list of victims of the Nazis in Liepeja that Edward Anders and his colleagues have drawn up from many sources lists his death as occurring in July. The killings began almost as soon as the Germans entered Liepaja, on June 29. The first killings at the lighthouse occurred on July 7.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

We next drove to the Jewish cemetery in Liepaja, which is still largely intact. Ieva said that this was the largest still existing Jewish cemetery in Latvia – when she saw it for the first time she was very surprised by its size. The graves and tombstones there are for people who died up until 1941. The first victims of the Nazis were buried in a mass grave at the cemetery (I did not see this), but afterwards they were buried where they were killed.

In the late 1990s Edward Anders and his colleagues began to work on assembling the names of Liepaja Jews who were living in the city before 1940, and discovering their fates under the Soviet and Nazi occupations. They came up with a list of more than 7,000 Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis or the Soviets. (The Soviets invaded Latvia on June 17, 1940, and on June 14, 1941, they deported thousands of people from the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the Gulag camps or to Siberia; 208 of these were Jews from Liepaja. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 – this included the three Baltic states, which were among the first locations to be overrun by the German armies. The first German killing squad arrived in Liepaja on June 29, 1941 – from Einsatzgruppe A. The Einsatzgruppen followed close behind the German armies invading the Soviet Union, and were responsible for killing about one million Jews).

In 2004 a memorial wall to the murdered Liepaja Jews was erected in the Jewish cemetery, listing the names of all the Jewish victims, those brave people who rescued Jews (33 Jews survived in Liepaja itself because they were protected by non-Jews), and the names of the donors. The wall was renewed in a more durable form in 2008.

The section of the wall with the names of my relatives, listing their names and ages at death, is on the next page: three generations of the family. Dobra and Mottel-Mordchai were in their early 70s, their son Abram was 47, and his two children Betja and Genia were 18 and 19 years old.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

This part of the plaque explains what happened to the Jews of Liepaja.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Names of the rescuers of Jews. Robert and Johanna Seduls saved eleven Jews by hiding them in their basement.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Names of those who donated to make the memorial possible, including myself.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

We then walked around the cemetery for about a half an hour, looking at the headstones of people who had been buried there. I took some photos of the headstones, which I will post later on my blog. I’ve copied the Hebrew and translated it – some of the epitaphs are quite moving, indicating the love that the family had for the person who died. The memorial to the Jews who died in the Holocaust is the only demonstration of their descendants and relatives that they are also fondly remembered.

Our next and last stop was the part of Liepaja where the Nazis established a ghetto. 832 Jews who remained alive in Liepaja on July 1, 1942 were forced into a ghetto of one block. One of the streets bounding the ghetto was Barenu iela [street] – and my great-great uncle Mottel-Mordchai lived at 19 Barenu iela. It turned out that his house was not included in the ghetto area, but it was not very far away. We drove Barenu iela and past the ghetto area. It seemed that most of the houses there had probably been there in the 1940s – they were old wooden houses, not the new housing built by the Soviets in the newer parts of the city.

When we came to the probable location of his house, there was nothing there – only the foundation and some of the wooden floor. According to Sandra, the house had been standing up until three years before, and then was torn down because it was in such bad shape. I have photographs of the house foundation and other houses on the street.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

Notice the apartment building behind the foundations – it’s from the Soviet period.

The next few buildings are from Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

16 Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

20 Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

16 Barenu iela.

From Liepaja, July 22, 2010

It was strange to stand on the same street I know that my relatives lived on, so many years ago. If they had survived the Nazi extermination, maybe there would still be members of the family living in this house, or in the city of Liepaja.

I never thought I would ever visit Liepaja - I was afraid of how I would feel, that it would simply be too emotionally overwhelming to be there. What I found, however, was that although I felt emotional at times - sadness, especially at the Skede beach, and anger at the Nazis for their vicious crimes, especially when I was at the Rumbula massacre site in Riga - the passage of time made the events of that time seem simply too far away. I think I also had the idea, somehow, that going to the place where these events happened, where the Nazis had committed their murders, would enable me to understand them better.

But instead I had the same feeling that I had in the fall of 2001 when I went to the site of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks - blank incomprehension. On the emotional level, I simply still do not understand how people could do these things, how they could kill innocent people in the street, how they could round them up and kill them in a public park, how they could assemble them together and drive them in trucks to the beach and shoot them at the edge of a enormous pit.

Why did the murderers not become revolted by what they were doing and simply stop? I've read theories of how soldiers can become indoctrinated to believe there is nothing wrong with killing other people in war, and that this brutalization can then be exploited so that they are willing to kill civilians (Christopher Browning has written about this). But when I picture a soldier faced with a woman or child, somebody who is clearly not a combatant, it is very hard for me to understand how he could imagine that it is permitted to kill them. Wouldn't he think of his own family - his mother or sister, or wife, or his own children?

I obviously do not have the answers to these questions. Maybe there are others who do, but I am still left with the blank incomprehension.

Arrival in Riga

I just arrived in Riga, Latvia, for the second part of my summer activities. I haven't been blogging very faithfully about being in Israel - I intend to write up my impressions and post them here (and to Facebook and other friends), so you'll find out more pretty soon.

Inadequate funding and attention to lung cancer

Good article by Jane Brody on why lung cancer, "the leading cancer killer in the United States" gets less research than many other forms of cancer. Lung cancer killed both my mother and my aunt (her sister). Both started smoking in their teens, long before the Surgeon General's report that smoking causes cancer and other lung diseases. My friend Sam (who did not smoke) died of lung cancer and his cancer was diagnosed only a month before his death. When I tell people that they died of lung cancer, the first question is always - did they smoke? Jane Brody explains why this question, and the assumption that only smokers get lung cancer, is wrong.

There are two things wrong here, according to clinicians who treat this killer of nearly 160,000 people a year — more than deaths from cancers of the breast, prostate and colon combined.

One is the element of blame, as if all smokers who get lung cancer began smoking and continued to smoke knowing the possible consequences. “Lung cancer is underfunded and a major reason is the idea that it’s all related to smoking and it’s the smoker’s fault,” said Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society. “This stigma has influenced both advocacy and research dollars.”

In fact, most smokers who develop lung cancer these days were hooked on nicotine long before it was recognized as an addictive drug and before smoking was clearly linked to cancer. I recall ads for a cigarette brand “most doctors recommend,” as well as the wanton distribution of free cigarettes to college students and young military recruits. I also recall the more recent industry ploy of marketing “low tar” and “light” cigarettes with a higher nicotine content that kept people hooked.

“Regardless of how patients get lung cancer, it’s not deserved,” Dr. Joan Schiller, an oncologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told me in an interview. “Nicotine addiction is not their fault. Most became hooked at a very young age. It’s a real dependence, like heroin or cocaine.”

As for nonsmokers who get lung cancer — about two-thirds of them women — Dr. Schiller said they “are a disenfranchised group that did nothing wrong, yet women with breast cancer get all the support and empathy.”

“It’s a sizable number of nonsmokers who get lung cancer, more than get leukemia or AIDS,” she went on. “If lung cancer unrelated to smoking was listed as a separate disease, it would be the sixth or seventh most common cause of cancer deaths.”

Smoking-related lung cancer typically strikes older people (the average age at diagnosis is 71), but it often afflicts nonsmokers much earlier, in the 30s and 40s or even younger. And because doctors rarely suspect lung cancer when people who never smoked develop respiratory symptoms, the disease is typically diagnosed too late for any hope of a cure.
Many nonsmokers are treated for months for conditions like pneumonia, bronchitis or asthma before the real problem is uncovered. In fact, one type of lung cancer unrelated to smoking, bronchoalveolar carcinoma, can even look like pneumonia on a chest X-ray.