Tag: Journal Articles

Prayer should alert us to social injustice, not anaesthetize us to it, according to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Rather than feeling mindlessly content, we should emerge with increased openness and awareness of possibilities for improving the world. Prayer is agitation that seeks to overthrow callousness and hatred.

Yet there is also a desire for inner peace through prayer. The answer may lie in mindfulness, a Buddhist concept well-integrated with Judaism in recent years. Mindfulness is defined as the practice of being aware of thoughts, actions, and their consequences. It enables seeing clearly the truth of each moment and feeling God’s presence.

Mindfulness is not a state but a practice that helps develop compassion and emanate peace. Jewish rituals and daily life inherently contain mindfulness practices, as explored by various Jewish authors who have studied both traditions.

Remarkably, those who designed Jewish rituals thousands of years ago anticipated the problem of mindless routine and built in ways of countering it. For example, the Yom Kippur haftarah selection from Isaiah 57:14–58:14 reminds us not to allow fasting and praying to degenerate into empty observance and hollow ritual routine.

Many Jewish prayers quite intentionally break us away from the quotidian and instill mindfulness. For instance, there are prayers for hearing good or bad news, seeing a rainbow, seeing a comet, seeing an exceptionally lofty mountain, seeing outstanding scholars, seeing large gatherings of Jews, seeing destroyed and restored synagogues, and meeting friends who have recovered from illness.

Through heightened awareness and Jewish prayer, we can rescue any moment from the mundane, and inject holiness and sacredness into it. That is mindful living.

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When Americans criticize wasteful government spending, they often fail to realize that the biggest sinkhole for public funds is what’s described as “national defense,” a program that, all too often, does little or nothing to defend them.

Take national missile defense, a program begun with much fanfare during the mid-1980s, when President Ronald Reagan realized that US nuclear weapons could not prevent a nuclear attack upon the United States. According to the President, his Strategic Defense Initiative (lampooned as “Star Wars” by Senator Edward Kennedy) would safeguard Americans by developing a space-based anti-missile system to destroy incoming nuclear missiles.

Most scientists doubted its technical feasibility, comparing it to using one speeding bullet to destroy another speeding bullet. Critics also pointed out that development of such a system would simply end up encouraging hostile nations to build more missiles to overwhelm it or, if they wanted to avoid the additional cost, to use decoys to confuse it. In addition, it would create a false sense of security.

Although “Star Wars” was never built, the fantastic dream of a missile shield took hold in Congress, which began to pour billions of dollars into variants of this program. And, today, more than thirty years later, the United States still lacks an effective missile defense system. The U.S. government, however, ignoring this dismal record, continues to lavish vast resources on this unworkable program, which has already cost American taxpayers over $180 billion.

In recent years, internationalism cooperation among nations for promotion of the common good has acquired a bad reputation. Of course, internationalism has long been anathema to the political Right, where a primitive tribalism and its successor, nationalism, have flourished for many years.

Focusing on their nation’s supposed superiority to others, a long line of rightwing demagogues, including Adolf Hitler (‘Deutschland Über Alles’) and Donald Trump (‘America First’), have stirred up xenophobia, racism, and militarism, often with some success in public opinion and at the polls. Numerous nationalist imitators have either secured public office or are hungering for it in many parts of the world.

But what is new in recent years is the critique of internationalism on the political Left. For centuries, internationalism was a staple of the progressive, avant garde outlook. Enlightenment thinkers promoted ideas of cosmopolitanism and the unity of humanity, critics of war and imperialism championed the development of international law, and socialists campaigned for replacing chauvinism with international working class solidarity.

In the aftermath of two devastating world wars, liberal reformers roundly condemned the narrow nationalist policies of the past and placed their hopes for a peaceful and humane future in two world organizations: the League of Nations and the United Nations.

A key reason for the decline of support for this internationalist vision on the political Left is the belief that internationalism has served as a cloak for great power militarism and imperialism. In fact, there is some justification for this belief, as the U.S. government, while professing support for ‘democracy’ and other noble aims, has all too often used its immense military, economic, and political power in world affairs with less laudatory motives, especially economic gain and control of foreign lands.

To continue this subterfuge, starting in 1945 they all publicly pledged to follow the guidelines of a different kind of global approach, cooperative internationalism, as championed by the United Nations. But, when it came to the crunch, they proved more interested in advancing their economies and political holdings than in developing international law and a cooperative world order.

Fortunately, there are organizations that recognize that, in dealing with these and other global problems, the world need not be limited to a choice between overheated nationalism and hypocritical internationalism. If the people of the world are to stave off the global catastrophes that now loom before them, they are going to have to break loose from the limitations of their nations’ traditional policies in world affairs. Above all, they need to cast off their lingering tribalism, recognize their common humanity, and begin working for the good of all.

By presenting Madeleine Dreyfus in his brilliant award-winning documentary, Weapons of the Spirit, Pierre Sauvage points to the fact that Jewish people themselves were rescuers of Jews on the plateau Vivarais-Lignon during the Holocaust.

The organization Madeleine Dreyfus worked for, Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), was founded in Russia in 1912 by a group of young doctors committed to offering poor Jews sanitary protection and health benefits. It moved in 1917 to Berlin where Albert Einstein was its honorary president. In 1933, it moved to Paris and in 1940 to Montpellier where it became the principal Jewish organization concerned with Jewish welfare in internment camps.

Madeleine Dreyfus was one of the OSE Jewish fieldworkers who placed over 100 Jewish children in non-Jewish homes during a thirteen-month period. She was arrested in 1943 and survived Bergen-Belsen. Scholars estimate that OSE saved approximately 6,000 children. During the Occupation of France, 32 OSE staff members lost their lives and 90 OSE children did not survive.

Jews were less than 1% of the French population but were 6% of the formal violent Resistance. Throughout occupied Europe, between 150,000 and 300,000 Jews were rescued. Jewish parents were often the first rescuers of Jewish children, making the anguished choice to separate from their children in hopes of their survival.

Until recently, there have been few attempts to recognize Jewish rescuers of other Jews during the Holocaust. Rescue was another form of resistance, taking forms like hiding in one’s home country, in adjacent forests or crossing borders to safety. Jewish people played an active role throughout occupied Europe in rescuing other Jews.

Even armed resisters like Tuvia Bielski, who with his brothers saved 1,200 Jews in the forests of Belorussia, prioritized rescue over combat, stating ‘To save a Jew is much more important than to kill Germans.’ Future iconography of Jewish resistance should include images of Jewish humanitarian workers saving children from camps and ghettos, and those who helped others cross borders to safety in Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.

The B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem is collecting names and issuing Jewish Rescuer of Jews citations.

The JPF was formed in 1941 because of the pressing need to support young Jewish conscientious objectors, many in prison or awaiting prison because they would not serve in the military. In that dark era family and friends often turned on them. Quaker communities stepped forward and offered what support they could but essentially these principled and, sadly, unpopular, Jewish COs were abandoned.

At that moment, two rabbis and one woman employee of a Jewish organization created the JPF. Since then, we’ve been there during our far too many wars. Given our nation’s addiction to military solutions a younger generation will still need to search for answers and responses.

No one knows if a draft will ever be reinstituted. Most of our Jewish antiwar groups seem to have vanished, having turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So we ask where young Jews could turn to in the event of yet another war, as I did at age 18 when the JPF was there to help. The JPF remains a voice for peace. Do we need to survive and thrive? You bet we do.

When new employee John Loftus first arrived at the Office of Special Investigations, a component of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice formed to track down some of the thousands of war criminals who had entered the country after World War II, his supervisor greeted him – so he reports in his 2010 book ‘America’s Nazi Secret’ – by saying, ‘Welcome to the Department of Justice. You now represent the most corrupt client in the world: the United States government.’ An exaggeration, perhaps, but it’s a judgment replicated in many ways in Richard Rashke’s ‘Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals,’ a meticulously researched study explaining how the U.S.A. deliberately allowed Nazi war criminals to enter the country while ignoring their complicity in mass murder and torture. Several thousand SS and SD officers, Gestapo officers, agents, and chiefs, Abwehr intelligence officers, Nazi propagandists and scientists, Einsatzcommandos, Waffen-SS volunteers, Vlasov’s legions, Nazi quislings and ethnic cleansers – all were welcomed and protected. [Rest of content formatted similarly…]

The Jewish Peace Fellowship was begun in 1941 as the United States was deeply involved in WWII. The beginning concept was primarily in support of Jewish conscientious objectors who were either applying for conscientious objection (CO) status from the military or who had already been imprisoned because of their beliefs.

The founding members of the JPF created educational information on Jewish issues of conscientious objection in order to educate the draft boards who had prior knowledge of only Christian roots of conscientious objection held by those applying to be CO’s.

Because of the current changes regarding young people entering the military and the absence of an actual draft today, the original mission of the JPF has become antiquated. Very few young people are seeking information on conscientious objection or non-violence today. I have not heard of anyone being sent to prison in the U.S.A. because of their religious beliefs regarding conscientious objection in many years.

We need fresh new program(s) for the Jewish Peace Fellowship. We need to draft a new mission statement. We are still the only organization that stands for peace within the Jewish Community. Please send us your thoughts and ideas. We need them for the future of our organization.

All Quiet on the Western Front, originally published in German in 1928 as Im Westen Nichts Neues, expresses deep-seeded humanism and fierce opposition to the violence of war. For those reasons, it became an object of Hitler’s hatred: Remarque was forced into exile in 1931, and the novel was burned and banned by the Nazis in 1933.

Widely regarded on a par with War and Peace as the greatest war novel (or anti-war novel), it is written in first-person from the perspective of Paul Bäumer, a student who enlists with his schoolmates in the German Army in World War I. Paul recounts his experiences on the front and on leave (based in part on Remarque’s own experiences as a soldier in the Great War).

An epilogue tells us that Paul died on the Western front in October 1918—just before the long-rumored armistice and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on November 11, 1918. Remarque’s novel pits the moral prohibition against killing into conflict with the demands of war. He does this by placing Paul in a series of face-to-face encounters with the enemy.

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Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ inspired the 1930 Hollywood film of the same name. Earning four Oscars including Best Director for Lewis Milestone, the film starred Lew Ayres as Paul Bäumer. Like Remarque’s novel, the film was banned in Nazi Germany. The experience of making the movie resulted in Ayres becoming a conscientious objector in World War II.

A 1979 remake directed by Derrick Mann starred Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine. Thomas had previously starred in a 1974 TV movie adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War story ‘The Red Badge of Courage’.

In the same year as the 1930 U.S. film, Germany’s Weimar Republic produced its own version of war in the trenches: ‘Westfront 1918’, directed by G. W. Pabst.

With the recent centennial of the Armistice, World War I films have returned to prominence. Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ stands out for its innovative use of original footage. Jackson employed groundbreaking techniques including speed adjustment, meticulous colorization, and forensic lip reading to bring century-old footage to life.

Other notable WWI films include:
– ‘Wings’ (1927)
– ‘The Dawn Patrol’ (1930)
– ‘La Grande Illusion’ (1937)
– ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957)
– ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962)
– ‘Gallipoli’ (1981)
– ‘A Very Long Engagement’ (2004)
– ‘Passchendaele’ (2008)