Behind the Aegis
Behind the Aegis's JournalHolocaust Memorial Day: Rise In Hate Crime Parallels The Darkest Days Of The 1930s, Warns EJCs Mo
Holocaust Memorial Day: Rise In Hate Crime Parallels The ‘Darkest Days Of The 1930s’, Warns EJC’s Moshe KantorThe recent rise in hate crime has “parallels with the darkest days of the 1930s”, the head of a body representing Europe’s Jews has warned.
Dr Moshe Kantor, head of the European Jewish Congress, said that the rise of Far Right and neo-Nazi parties is exceptionally worrying.
As commemorations take place around the world for Holocaust Memorial Day, he said that there were dangers “lurking in our own back yard” and called for improvements in security, education and legislation to deal with them.
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“Only a small minority supported Hitler’s plan to kill all European Jews through mass extermination, a plan that was widely circulated years before.
“But he was able to act because an undercurrent of hatred had seeped into everyday life.”
That undercurrent of hatred is still there today – and could have worrying consequences, he said.
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From the article, but bared repeating:
“But he was able to act because an undercurrent of hatred had seeped into everyday life.”
UNDERCURRENTS are just as dangerous as those we see in front of our faces. A threat to one group is a threat to us all!
From a survivor:
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
-- Elie Wiesel (source)
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
-- Elie Wiesel (source)
Holocaust Remembrance Day: LA man shares harrowing story of survival
For most of his life, Joseph Neustadt couldn’t bring himself to talk about his teenage years during the Holocaust.
It was only when he and his family watched the 1993 film “Schindler’s List” that he began to share his memories. The Latvian-born Neustadt, the sole survivor in his family, now speaks freely about those four horrific years and has even shared his story to high school and college students.
“God kept me alive and chose me to be a witness,” the 89-year-old resident of the Los Angeles Jewish Home’s Eisenberg Village in Reseda tells them.
Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was designated by the United Nations General Assembly to commemorate the memory of the roughly 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews killed by Nazi Germany more than seven decades ago.
“These next few years will kind of be the last chance we have to hear Holocaust survivors’ personal narratives,” said Jordanna Gessler, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust’s director of education. “We have these eyewitnesses who can teach us so much about what it means to persevere and to survive and to be resilient individuals, and it also speaks to the firsthand accounts of humanity’s vast destruction and cruelty.”
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Wyoming Just Took Aim at LGBTs
Last week, with little fanfare, a bill was introduced into the Wyoming state legislature. House Bill 135, also called the Government Nondiscrimination Act, would legalize discrimination against the LGBTQ community, so long as the discrimination is done for religious or “moral” reasons.
The act is sponsored by three Republican representatives and two Republican senators.
Specifically, the bill would forbid the government from taking action against any “person,” including public and private corporations and entities, if that person acts on a “religious belief or moral conviction” that marriage is the union of one man and woman, or that “‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean an individual’s biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy genetics at the time of birth.”
The bill is remarkable for the breadth of organizations it allows to discriminate on the basis of religious freedom. “If passed, HB 135 would allow government employees, licensed professionals (like teachers or counselors) and private businesses to discriminate,” said Sabrina King, Policy Director at the ACLU of Wyoming. Under the bill, even hospitals and doctors would be allowed to deny routine health care services. (The bill does not exempt the provision of “emergency medical treatment necessary for treatment of an illness or injury.”)
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More to come....
Jewish Group: Anti-Semitic Tweets Erupt After Rabbis Prayer At Trumps Inauguration
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!The rabbi who blessed Donald Trump at his presidential inauguration Friday said he expected the anti-Semitic messages that were hurled his way on Twitter ― and that they wont stop him from doing what he thinks is right.
The Times of Israel reports that hundreds of hateful messages targeting Rabbi Marvin Hier appeared on the social media site following his remarks at Trumps inauguration. Hier was invited by Trump to offer a prayer Friday along with five other religious leaders.
On Twitter, some users expressed surprise and disgust that Hier was speaking. One person depicted him as the devil, Hier mentioned with amusement Monday.
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Theres been a rise in anti-Semitic activity since the election, according to Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights bigotry and attacks against Jewish people.
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Well, well, well. Anyone surprised? Think we will justification for it? Oh wait...
Of course, the flip side is how the right is portraying the first rabbi to speak at an inauguration in 30 years proves how the new "president" isn't anti-Semitic, that and his having a Jewish SIL and converted daughter. 
I guess Strom Thurmond wasn't a vile racist because he did have a bi-racial daughter and an African-American mistress. 
GD: Anti-Semitic Tweets Erupt After Rabbis Prayer At Trumps Inauguration
The rabbi who blessed Donald Trump at his presidential inauguration Friday said he expected the anti-Semitic messages that were hurled his way on Twitter ― and that they wont stop him from doing what he thinks is right.
The Times of Israel reports that hundreds of hateful messages targeting Rabbi Marvin Hier appeared on the social media site following his remarks at Trumps inauguration. Hier was invited by Trump to offer a prayer Friday along with five other religious leaders.
On Twitter, some users expressed surprise and disgust that Hier was speaking. One person depicted him as the devil, Hier mentioned with amusement Monday.
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Theres been a rise in anti-Semitic activity since the election, according to Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights bigotry and attacks against Jewish people.
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Always there, sometimes just beneath the surface, other times right in your fucking face.
Anti-Semitic Tweets Erupt After Rabbis Prayer At Trumps Inauguration
Source: Huffington Post
The rabbi who blessed Donald Trump at his presidential inauguration Friday said he expected the anti-Semitic messages that were hurled his way on Twitter ― and that they won’t stop him from doing what he thinks is right.
The Times of Israel reports that hundreds of hateful messages targeting Rabbi Marvin Hier appeared on the social media site following his remarks at Trump’s inauguration. Hier was invited by Trump to offer a prayer Friday along with five other religious leaders.
On Twitter, some users expressed surprise and disgust that Hier was speaking. One person depicted him as the devil, Hier mentioned with amusement Monday.
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There’s been a rise in anti-Semitic activity since the election, according to Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights bigotry and attacks against Jewish people.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rabbi-marvin-hier-inauguration-anti-semitism_us_58864f60e4b096b4a2339c6e
Jewish Centers Across U.S. Evacuated Amid New Wave of Bomb Threats
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!Jewish Centers Across U.S. Evacuated Amid New Wave of Bomb Threats
Source: Haaretz
Several Jewish Community Centers in the U.S. were evacuated Wednesday after receiving near-simultaneous bomb threats, according to various local reports, just nine days after a nearly identical incident targeted 16 Jewish insitutions across the eastern U.S.
Bomb threats were reported in Miami and Palm Springs Garden, Florida, Birmingham, Alabama, West Hartford and Woodbridge, Connecticut, Newton and Worcester, Massachusetts, Scotch Plains, New Jersey, Albany and Syracuse, New York, Detroit, Michigan, San Rafael, California and Nashville, Tennessee.
A local NBC affiliate said two community centers had been evacuated in Connecticut, while the Miami Beach Jewish Community Center in Florida was also threatened and briefly evacuated Wednesday, according to local police. At the same time, the Jewish center in Birmingham, Alabama was also evacuated, as was a center in Nashville, Tennessee, according to The Tennessean.
Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.765875
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to ehrnst )
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Keep in mind this is second wave of threats, but one does have to wonder if this, German court calls synagogue torching an act to 'criticize Israel, will be the reaction should an Americanized Kristallnacht takes place.
Jewish Centers in Several States Targeted With Bomb Threats
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!Bomb threats targeted Jewish community centers in at least six states Monday, and some were made with prerecorded telephone calls, according to an official with the Jewish Federations of North America.
It's not clear why up to 20 Jewish community centers across the South and Northeast were targeted, said Richard Sandler, chair of the JFNA board of trustees.
"Some of the threats were robo-calls," said Sandler, adding that the number of threats was unusually high.
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In Nashville, Tennessee, 225 people were evacuated from the Gordon Jewish Community Center and an adjacent school after a security guard received a bomb threat over the phone. Buildings were evacuated and authorities investigated similar threats in Atlanta; Tenafly, New Jersey; Columbia, South Carolina; and Wilmington, Delaware.
In Maryland, threats also were called into Jewish community centers in Baltimore and Rockville.
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Prelude to an American Kristallnacht? Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey all received threats. Is this nothing more than a test run to see how upset people would be? A prank?
In all honesty, I doubt many would be very upset by multiple attacks on Jewish institutions, and I don't hold much hope that the incoming administration would do much, other than use it to their advantage to restrict more rights or scapegoat the wrong people.
Pharrell Williams and stars from 'Hidden Figures' condemn 'hateful comments'
Gospel singer Kim Burrell calls homosexuality 'perverted,' Pharrell Williams and stars from 'Hidden Figures' condemn 'hateful comments'
Gospel singer Kim Burrell labeled homosexuality “perverted” in a sermon she gave in her other life as a Pentecostal preacher, quickly eliciting responses from both Pharrell Williams, with whom she sings on the “Hidden Figures” soundtrack, and two stars from that film, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.
Burrell and Williams were originally scheduled to perform the soundtrack song “I See a Victory,” on which he is also a producer, on “The Ellen Show” on Thursday, with Monáe also slated to appear as a guest.
But on Tuesday morning, show host Ellen DeGeneres announced on Twitter that Burrell would not join Monáe and Williams on Thursday’s show.
“I came to tell you about sin,” Burrell said in the recent sermon at the Houston church she founded and where she is pastor, Love and Liberty Fellowship Church International. “That perverted homosexual spirit, and the spirit of delusion and confusion, it has deceived many men and women.”
A firestorm of criticism was touched off when video of the sermon began to circulate and Burrell took to Facebook Live to add, “There are a lot of people that I’m aware of that struggle or deal [with] or have that spirit. Have I discriminated against them? Have I ever outright told them that I don’t love you and you going to hell? … I don’t give that call.”
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This is a shameful situation for two reasons, the first being the obvious homophobic rhetoric and hate, and the second is the potential it has to mar what could be a great movie, certainly one of historic importance.
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Please read this article!
Black women who helped put America in space get their day onscreen
As if to ensure the 2016 Oscar nominations don’t come out as white as Santa’s beard, three fine films about African-Americans in the late ’50s and early ’60s have come out in the last eight weeks: “Loving,” “Fences” and “Hidden Figures.”
The last, which is the least overtly emotional, makes subtle points while depicting three women who helped NASA enter the space race with the Soviet Union. Most people who watched John Glenn become the first man to orbit the Earth multiple times – myself included, as a boy in 1962 – had no idea such women put him up there safely.
Director Theodore Melfi wrote the screenplay with Allison Schroder, adapting Margot Lee Shetterly’s book. They never overstress a scene: Whites working around black colleagues are quietly dismissive but not overtly cruel, and a Virginia police officer who finds the trio stranded by the roadside is suspicious but not vicious. The movie indicts exclusion and racial hierarchy without finding villains inside that system.
“Figures” takes place at Langley Air Force Base, as officials make calculations for launches at Cape Canaveral. Math prodigy Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) crunches numbers at amazing speed, but she’s more than a human computer in a pre-IBM age. Her insights into patterns go beyond those of male co-workers, and her boss (lethargic Kevin Costner) figures that out.
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‘Hidden Figures’ is a crowd-pleaser with math appeal
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