Friday, July 08, 2022

07/08 Links Pt2: Misogyny and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Western Left; Presbyterian Church (USA) Scrapes the Bottom of the Antisemitic Slippery Slope

From Ian:

Fathom: Fathoming the Intellectual Revolution of our Time (1) | ‘Punch a Terf’ and ‘Smash the Zionists’: Misogyny and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Western Left
Series Introduction: Huge waves of intellectual change are sweeping the Western world at an astonishing speed. Liberal democratic societies are being transformed by Postmodernism, Gender Identity Ideology, Critical Race Theory, ’Whiteness Studies’ ‘Postcolonial Theory’, ‘Intersectionality’, and related upheavals in the realm of ideas. Some see in these changes an exciting new Critical Theory and a necessary and welcome extension of the liberation struggles of recent decades. Others see a new ‘Cynical Theory’ – as a recent book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey dubbed it – a dangerous new irrationalism, polarizing anti-racist racism, woke homophobia, and Wars on Women and the West. Whatever position one takes, it is inconceivable that this intellectual revolution will leave untouched the form taken by the ‘oldest hatred’ because, as David Nirenberg’s monumental study Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition showed us in exhaustive detail, no intellectual revolution ever has. Radically new paradigms of thought have always seen antisemitism shape-shift again, new notions of Jewish malignity and new anathemas emerging out of the ferment. Over the next two years Fathom will explore the ramifications of the intellectual revolution of our time for the shapes taken by antisemitism and for global perceptions of Zionism and Israel, so often understood within the emerging intellectual orthodoxies as ‘White’, ‘Western’, and ‘Racist’, and so marked down for ‘cancellation’. We anticipate the series will provoke debate, but here is one old idea that we hope still has some life in it: rather than seek to cancel the debate, why not join it? We begin the series with this critical reflection on Gender Identity ideology by Kathleen Hayes. (Alan Johnson)

Essay Introduction: Misogyny and antisemitism are very different things, with different aetiologies and histories, but there is an interplay between the two in the contemporary Western progressive left, argues Kathleen Hayes. Today’s bien pensant is permitted to hate both women and Jews with a deliciously clear conscience. Jews are fine people, some of my best friends, the leftist will declare—it’s the Zionists who are racists and must be driven from the planet. I love women, he’ll say; of course they deserve equality and dignity—it’s the TERFs who are fascists and must be cancelled and assaulted. Even as he congratulates himself on his lack of prejudice, progressive and identity politics allow him to indulge in a socially sanctioned variety of … antisemitism and misogyny. Hayes warns that ‘once truth is up for grabs, all truths are up for grabs’ and ‘a mind that rejects the reality of biological sex is one unlikely to recognise basic facts about the Holocaust, or about living Jews.’

A few decades back, without a vote being taken, a handful of intellectuals decided to roll back the Enlightenment. Holding hands and chanting ‘Down with grand narratives,’ they dismissed as hubris the paradigmatic Western belief that it was possible to know anything approximating truth. Equating the Enlightenment with slavery, colonialism and women’s subjugation, they declared positivism the greatest sin and announced they were post everything. They burned an effigy of Universal Man and amid the ashes erected an elaborate new scaffolding comprised of everyone he was not. Because Universal Man had been an oppressive lie—a white, able-bodied heterosexual man who was far from being universal—they deemed that henceforth, history’s unrepresented would cohere around, and fixate on, their isolated individual identities. The universal is dead; long live the particular.

As these specific identities were arrayed against one another in practice, it was necessary to differentiate between them on the basis of their respective victimhoods. By tacit agreement, a points system was created in which some were deemed worthy of respect as victims while others were not. With the advent of ‘intersectionality’ the points system became ever more elaborate, determined by layer upon layer of victimhood. Those who failed to rack up the requisite points were declared privileged and told to accept their places on the bottom of the pyramid. This was done in the name of historical justice. What unfolded was a grotesque parody of it.

This essay seeks to explain how ideas so absurd that—as Orwell put it—only an intellectual could believe them became the basis for a seismic shift in public policy around the world, with devastating consequences most immediately for women; lesbians, gays and bisexuals; and distressed children and their parents. It describes how the flagrantly anti-materialist, ostensibly progressive but actually deeply retrograde set of ideas called ‘gender ideology’ took root far outside academia, and how it became an unchallengeable cult. Because social and intellectual turmoil inevitably means increased targeting of Jews (who are often labelled ‘white’ and ‘privileged’ and ‘powerful’ in this new intellectual orthodoxy), I will draw attention to how these ideas impact Jews, even though they may seem at first to have little or nothing to do with us. Finally, I will gratefully invoke the Frankfurt School’s writings about authoritarianism to argue that if today’s madness cannot easily be fought, it can at least be better understood.
Presbyterian Church (USA) Scrapes the Bottom of the Antisemitic Slippery Slope
In 2014, the Presbyterian Church (USA) became the first Protestant mainline denomination to call for divestment from Israeli companies. When the PCUSA reversed itself in 2016, we at the Simon Wiesenthal Center cautioned against too much optimism.

The goal of the anti-Israel lobby, we said, was not just to punish Israel economically, but to put the Jewish state on the defensive about its policies, its self-defense, and its very existence. The PCUSA introduced all those elements into their church’s conversation. Since then, it has been a fast track down the slippery slope of antisemitism.

We wish that we were wrong in our prediction about PCUSA. Sadly, we were not.

No Jews were invited to committee meetings in preparation for the PCUSA’s upcoming General Assembly, but “Jews” were very much in evidence. A raft of anti-Israel resolutions, all of them unthinkable just eight years ago, were discussed and passed. And it’s not a huge surprise.

Over the last several decades, PCUSA has lost hundreds of thousands of members, and many dozens of churches.

When it comes to Israel, the PCUSA initially focused on the alleged evils of “the occupation.” Now its hate has vastly expanded, from discussions on withholding military aid from Israel, to labeling Israel as “apartheid” and supporting the Kairos Palestine statement — a pseudo-theological document that denies the connection between Jews and the land to which they were attached since Biblical times. PCUSA also gives a moral pass to Palestinian terrorism.

PCUSA’s fig leaf self-description as supporting both sides in a complex dispute has been dropped, leaving PCUSA’s naked anti-Israel worldview on full display.

Over the years, the PCUSA would mourn the destruction in Gaza without mentioning the thousands of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel. Throughout, however, PCUSA was careful not to attack Jews. At most, it was “Zionists” who were guilty.

But now, they’ve dropped the pretense. The commissioners who spoke at recent meetings spoke openly, not about Israelis, but about “Jews,” and things “Jewish” — such as, “The Israeli regime … advances one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians.”


When the IRS Targeted Jewish Activists
FBI agents gathered background information from what they called “persons in New York City who are familiar with Israelite matters.” They also eavesdropped on the Bergsonites’ telephone conversations, opened their mail, went through their trash, and planted informants in the group to steal documents from Bergson’s office. The FBI hoped to find proof the Bergson Group was secretly assisting the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground militia in Palestinethat was headed by Menachem Begin. They found no such evidence.

The authorities’ second goal was to find a link between Bergson and the Communist Party. One FBI memo approvingly quoted a rival Jewish organization’s description of the Bergsonites as “a group of thoroughly disreputable Communist Zionists.” In a private letter, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to the playwright Ben Hecht and six other leading Bergson activists as “fellow travelers.” But the FBI’s spying on Bergson did not turn up any evidence of a Communist link, either.

At the same time, the IRS launched a full-scale inquiry into the Bergson Group’s finances, seeking to revoke its tax-exempt status. For nearly a year, IRS agents repeatedly visited the group’s New York City headquarters, once for a stretch where they stayed from morning until night for more than two weeks.

Louis and Jack Yampolsky, a father-and-son accounting team that handled Bergson’s finances pro bono, had to dig out and reconcile every piece of financial information in the group’s records. “There were no photocopy machines in those days, so we had to hand-copy every disbursement and every receipt that was given for every donation,” Jack Yampolsky told me in an interview some years ago. “And because the Bergson Group had enormous grassroots appeal, it received literally thousands of one-dollar or two-dollar donations from people all over the country.”

In the end, the IRS investigators were unable to find evidence of any wrongdoing. In fact, as the IRS team became familiar with the group’s work, they came to sympathize with it, and “when they finished, [they] made a contribution between them–every one of them gave a few dollars,” Bergson later told Prof. David S. Wyman.

The sympathy expressed by the IRS agents contrasted sharply with the sentiments expressed in some of the FBI documents which I obtained. One FBI report about Bergson activist Maurice Rosenblatt derisively referred to the leftwing Coordinating Committee for Democratic Action, in which Rosenblatt was active, as “this Semitic Committee.” The FBI memo complained that Rosenblatt and his colleagues were trying to “smear” Nazi sympathizers in New York City.

“When there is a genuine threat, governments sometimes have to do things like eavesdrop,” Jack Yampolsky conceded. “But in our case, they were doing it for political reasons, and antisemitism also played a role. The fact that we vocally disagreed with U.S. government policy regarding the Holocaust and Jewish statehood was not a valid reason for the Roosevelt administration to enlist the FBI and the IRS in a war against the Bergson group.”


Guardian Peace breaks out in Mid-East - Palestinians hardest hit
The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall devoted most of his column (A mirage of peace? Joe Biden ventures back into Middle East’s shifting sands) discussing the ‘new’ Middle East that the US president will be visiting next month.

Tisdall mentions the “growing security and economic alignment between Israel and the Arab states” which he characterises as among “the most spectacular” regional shifts, that includes the Abraham Accords, as well as the recent creation of a regional air defence alliance between Israel and its Arab neighbors to deter Iranian missile and drone attacks. This rapprochement, he observes, is “fuelled by shared concern about Tehran’s presumed nuclear weapons ambitions” and may eventually include the nomralisation of relations between Israel Saudi Arabia.

After several paragraphs in which Tisdall discusses matters somehwat peripheral to new Israeli-Arab relations, he ends his piece thusly:
But it’s the Palestinians who stand to lose most from a partial, highly selective “peace in our time”. Abandoned by Arab allies, manipulated by Iran, patronised by the US, ignored by wartime Europe, divided among themselves and preyed upon by the Israeli state, the cause of Palestinian independence has never looked bleaker.

Times are changing. But Palestine’s betrayal is timeless.

Tisdall has it completely backwards.

The fact that many of Israel’s Arab neighbors have finally, after seven decades, decided to finally abandon their futile and self-defeating war against the Jewish state does not represent a “betrayal” of the Palestinians.

Rather, it should serve as a lesson to the Palestinians on the folly and destructiveness of their own path – that of terrorism, rejectionism, lawfare, BDS, demonisation, conspiracism and antisemitism – and the need to embark on a truly revolutionary embrace of co-existence and negotiations with Israel, liberalism and democracy at home – a break from the Manichean framing of their struggle with the Jewish state.
When ‘Racial Justice’ Means Antisemitism: A Takeover of the Yale Postdoctoral Association
In August of 2021, when most newly-arrived postdoctoral fellows at Yale were busy settling into new apartments and new labs, the “Racial Justice Subcommittee” of the Yale Postdoctoral Association (YPA) published a “Resource on Palestine” on the YPA website, which is an official platform of Yale University.

The statement was issued as a guide for, and in the name of, more than 1,000 postdoctoral fellows at Yale. In the short — and mostly fact-free — statement, one can find many of the usual anti-Israel (and antisemitic) tropes about a “colonial” power and an “apartheid” state that oppresses Palestinians. Why any of this propaganda belongs in a guide for Yale postdocs is not at all clear.

To their great credit, a group of (mostly Israeli) postdocs, knowledgeable about the realities in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, took exception to the “Resource.” They did so using reason and logic, and by drawing on facts and reports and reality — entirely unlike the original screed.

After eight months of patient and often painstaking negotiations with the YPA leadership, these postdocs succeeded in publishing a thoroughly-documented counter-argument on the YPA site (although there is as yet no link from the original to the counter-statement).

But now, the same postdocs who attacked Israel last year are at it again.
Colorado Appeals Court Rules in Favor of Student Who Posted Antisemitic Snapchat Content
A United States appeals court has ruled that a Colorado school’s expulsion of a student for posting an antisemitic Snapchat failed the “substantial disruption test” established by the Supreme Court to assess whether disciplinary measures for offensive speech violate the First Amendment.

The incident took place in 2019, when a student at Cherry Hill High School in the Denver metropolitan area — identified as “C.G.” — captioned a picture of his three friends wearing hats and wigs, “Me and the boys bout to exterminate the Jews.” He deleted the image and apologized hours later in another post, but it spread through the community and eventually appeared on the radar of the Anti-Defamation League Mountain States division, which alerted the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office determined that C.G. did not pose an immediate threat to the Jewish community, but school administrators suspended him for violating the school’s prohibition on verbally abusive speech, and following a hearing, expelled him for one year.

The boy’s family sued Cherry Hill School District, arguing that it violated his First Amendment rights. The case was dismissed in US District Court in August 2021 — prompting the recent appeal in which the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday struck down the previous court’s decision, ruling that “offensive, controversial speech can still be protected” and “these facts do not support a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption that would warrant dismissal of the complaint.”

“Moreover,” the court continued, “C.G.’s post did not include weapons, specific threats, or speech directed toward the school or its students.”
Losing the semantic battle, winning the war against BDS
The last month may have set a record for BDS failures.

Start with Unilever reversing the Ben & Jerry's boycott of Judea and Samaria. B&J tripled down on its anti-Semitic position in response; however, its parent company learned that anti-Semitism does have a price as it was put on several state lists of companies prohibited from receiving state government investments. Some divested their shares of the company. The notion that denying Israelis a particular brand of ice cream would bring the government to its knees was indicative of the often-comic absurdity of the BDS movement.

Speaking of state anti-boycott laws, the antisemites have been pinning their hopes on the ACLU to convince the courts that they violate the First Amendment. The ACLU has successfully intimidated congressional Democrats to prevent enacting federal legislation. The friends of antisemites suffered a devastating loss, however, when a federal appeals court upheld the law's constitutionality. The 9-1 ruling reversed a February 2021 decision the BDSers thought would undo all the state laws. Judge Jonathan Kobe said the law did not prevent criticism of Israel or the law. "It only prohibits economic decisions that discriminate against Israel. Because those commercial decisions are invisible to observers unless explained, they are not inherently expressive and do not implicate the First Amendment."

Touché.

That was not all. The BDS movement thought it had won another big victory, declaring its pressure campaign "works even on the largest corporations" when General Mills' Pillsbury brand announced it had sold its stake in a plant in Atarot, which activists characterize as an illegal settlement.

Alas, the cheers turned to boos when General Mills responded. "We have made clear the global business strategy that drove this decision. Any claims by others taking credit for [it] are false," said the company in a statement. "We continue to sell our products in Israel and look forward to continuing to serve Israeli consumers with our other brands."


United Nations presents follow-up to unprecedented report on combatting antisemitism
The United Nations released a report by Ahmed Shaheed, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, called Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism, a four-page report that is a follow-up to an earlier novel report. Both reports are especially notable coming from an organization that has long been accused of displaying bias against Israel.

The first-of-its-kind report identifies antisemitism as a pressing and enduring challenge that governments, as well as social media giants, religious leaders, government officials, and others, should confront with urgency.

"As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres [stresses], antisemitism is not a problem for the Jewish community alone. Rather, antisemitism is a phenomenon that is toxic to democracy and mutual respect of citizens, that threatens all people’s human rights," it states. The earlier "groundbreaking" report

The new report is a follow-up to a historic report presented to the UN General Assembly in 2019, also by Shaheed, on global antisemitism as a human rights issue. It raised rare criticism by a UN official regarding the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, writing that “international law recognizes boycotts as constituting legitimate forms of political expression and that non-violent expressions of support for boycotts are, as a general matter, legitimate speech that should be protected.”

His creation of the first stand-alone report on antisemitism by a UN leader was applauded by Jewish groups as groundbreaking.

Shaheed, a Maldivian diplomat who has served in his position since 2016, states in the report that trends in antisemitism since 2019 revealed many positive developments in combating antisemitism but enduring challenges are still present. Shaheed is an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council.

Notable concerns addressed by the Special Rapporteur
- "A lack of awareness in many countries of what antisemitism is, and particularly its contemporary manifestations, remains widespread;"
- "A growing number of countries have imposed restrictions on the important, centuries-old religiouspractices of shechita (kosher slaughter) and brit mila (male circumcision) that violate the right tofreedom of religion of members of their Jewish communities and could threaten the viability ofcontinued Jewish communal life in those countries;"
- "Monitors have documented a substantial increase in the prevalence of and public engagement withantisemitic content on several online platforms since 2019. While several social media and othertechnology companies have committed to responding to the prevalence of online antisemitism,the efforts that those platforms have taken to diminish its visibility – and not all are making such efforts – havethus far not been sufficient to stem its spread."
Toyota partners with Israel’s Quantum Machines for quantum computing solutions
Japanese automotive giant Toyota has tapped Israeli company Quantum Machines, through its trading arm Toyota Tsusho Corporation, for a partnership that will build future quantum capabilities and offer the multinational’s Japanese customers access to quantum technologies, the parties said this week.

Founded in 2018 by award-winning quantum electronics experts Dr. Itamar Sivan, Dr. Yonatan Cohen and Dr. Nissim Ofek, Quantum Machines built the Quantum Orchestration Platform (QOP), a hardware and software solution for operating quantum systems to facilitate research and enable future breakthroughs.

It also developed the QUA, a standard universal language for quantum computers that the startup says will allow researchers and scientists to write programs for varied quantum computers with one unified code.

When announcing its $50 million investment round last September, Quantum Machines said that it already provides control and orchestration systems for quantum computing to customers in 15 countries, including multinational corporations, government laboratories, academic institutions, and quantum development startups.

Sivan told The Times of Israel via email that the new partnership will allow Toyota Tsusho to offer its customers Quantum Machines’ flagship OPX+ solution, which he described as a “hardware system developed from the ground up for quantum and designed to meet the extremely demanding requirements of quantum control protocols, including precision, timing, complexity, and ultra-low latency.”
IBM acquires Israeli startup Databand to boost data capabilities
US tech giant IBM said Wednesday that it acquired Israeli startup Databand.ai, the developer of a data observability software platform for data scientists and engineers, to strengthen the multinational’s data, artificial intelligence, and automation offerings.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to the agreement, Databand employees will join the IBM Data and AI division to further enhance IBM’s portfolio of data and AI products including its IBM Watson, a question-answering computer system, and IBM Cloud Pak for Data, a data analytics platform.

IBM said the acquisition was finalized in late June and that the purchase will build on IBM’s research and development investments, as well as strategic acquisitions in AI and automation. Databand is IBM’s fifth acquisition this year, the company noted.

Databand was founded in 2018 by Josh Benamram, Victor Shafran, and Evgeny Shulman, and rolled out a software platform that the company says helps enterprises and organizations get on top of their data to ensure “data health” and fix issues like errors and anomalies, pipeline failures, and general quality.

The data observability and data quality market is likely to see further growth, as more organizations look to closely track and protect their data. A Statista report estimated that the sector will grow from about $13 billion in worth in 20

20 to almost $20 billion in 2024.
Wimbledon strawberries grown using Israeli tech
Biting into a strawberry grown from a crop to be served at the Wimbledon tennis championships, this is Israel’s agriculture minister Oded Forer on a visit to Britain this week.

The fruit was grown using an Israeli irrigation system, making the moment a symbol of his pledge to share innovative technology with the UK and other partners across the globe to combat a looming food crisis.

In an exclusive interview with the JC, Mr Forer described it as Israel’s “contribution to humanity”.

He said: “We are now in a situation — and I’m talking about not only Israel or the UK, but the whole world — that we don’t have time to wait.

“There is a crisis because of the climate changing and global warming, and we are adding to that the war between Russia and Ukraine that influences the whole world and all the food supply, and we need to find new solutions.”

Mr Forer was speaking to the JC at the science research organisation National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) in Kent.

He added: “We must deepen our collaboration with the UK in the field of agriculture.”
Boris Johnson’s Jewish moments, from a broken menorah to Israel-UN policy change
Yiddish on Passover
In a 2021 video greeting for Passover, Johnson, whose maternal great-grandfather, Elias Avery Lowe, was a Moscow-born Jew, demonstrated some deep familiarity with Jewish customs and even used a Yiddish word, kvetch — which means to whine — to refer to some of what goes on when Jewish families sit around the Passover Seder dinner table.

A shift on Israel and the UN
As foreign secretary, Johnson spoke out pointedly against what he described as anti-Israel bias at United Nations forums. He also shifted the position of the United Kingdom on items dedicated to criticizing Israel alone, moving it from “yes” to abstention and finally to a “no.” In 2021, he went one step further and stated that the United Kingdom was opposed to the Palestinian bid for an investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel. “This investigation gives the impression of being a partial and prejudicial attack on a friend and ally of the UK,” he said. His position furthered the reversal started by his predecessor May, which ended decades of the Foreign Office’s endorsement of resolutions and initiatives hostile to Israel.

An intimate Holocaust survivor discussion
Whereas his predecessors often spoke at events featuring Holocaust survivors and commemoration activists, Johnson last year organized an hour-long video call with a survivor and a death camp liberator in which his role was to listen. Johnson sat on the edge of his seat as he heard the stories of Auschwitz survivor Renee Salt and a Bergen-Belsen liberator Ian Forsyth. As he interviewed the two elderly speakers, he stopped to inquire about certain details (“You must have been 14 by then?” he asked Salt) and told the two that what they had told him was “one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard.”
Israeli family risks it all to retrieve rare Ethiopian version of the Book of Psalms
When they flew out of this country for Israel three decades ago, Askabo Meshiha’s family left something valuable behind.

Unlike many other Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel in 1991, they didn’t say goodbye to any relatives. They also left behind a centuries-old Book of Psalms written in Ge’ez, a Semitic language used by Jewish clergy in Ethiopia.

Secretly and on short notice, the family had to leave their rural homes for the capital Addis Ababa with as little baggage as possible, and so they entrusted non-Jewish neighbors with keeping the book safe until they could retrieve it. From Israel, they tracked the book’s whereabouts for more than 30 years, never losing hope of getting it back — even after their native country fell into civil war and the book wound up in the hands of a Christian priest who demanded a steep ransom to release it.

Their perseverance paid off.

In March, an unusual set of circumstances finally allowed the family to be reunited with the document, a rare but tangible relic from the rich traditions of one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities. The family now hopes to restore the book and use it to strengthen their community’s fading identity.

“When I posted the picture of the book in the family WhatsApp group, people went nuts, it’s like a long-lost relative had returned,” said Ayanawo Ferada Senebato, Meshiha’s 43-year-old grandson and a journalist and activist promoting causes linked to Ethiopian Israelis.
Israeli doctors save life of Kenyan toddler with heart defect
The mother of Bodin, a two-year-old boy from Kenya, is a nurse by profession. She knew something was wrong when he struggled to breastfeed. At Kenyatta National Hospital, she met with Dr. Osano, who was trained by Israel's "Save a Child's Heart" foundation to diagnose and treat children suffering from congenital heart disease. He examined Bodin and diagnosed a hole in his aorta. The boy was in urgent need of open-heart surgery to save his life.

With the help of Save a Child's Heart, Bodin recently underwent life-saving surgery at Wolfson Medical Center.

Bodin never expected to be the first child to inaugurate the state-of-the-art operating room on the new surgery and catheterization floor of the children's hospital, sponsored by the Azrieli Foundation Canada-Israel. As part of the training provided by Save a Child's Heart, the operating room is fitted with cameras that allow Israeli doctors to live-stream their surgeries to cardiologists and surgeons in Africa.

The new seven-floor Save a Child's Heart (SACH) International Pediatric Cardiac Center (IPCC) and Sylvan Adams Children's Hospital houses all of the infrastructure and equipment needed to perform life-saving cardiac treatments, including all pre-and post-operative care.

Dr. Osano, who first diagnosed Bodin, stayed in Kenya but was able to observe the operation from his personal computer thousands of miles away and also wish Bodin good luck prior to entering surgery.
Musical About Jewish Teen Diarists Who Died in the Holocaust to Premiere at California Center for Arts
The California Center for Arts, Escondido (CCAE), will later this month host the world premiere of a musical about five Jewish teenage diarists who were killed in the Holocaust.

In the 90-minute show “Witnesses,” which open on July 15, five songwriting teams will each focus on telling the story of one teen diarist and Holocaust victim, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. Tony Award winner Robert L. Freedman incorporated lines from the diaries when writing the show’s script.

“Witnesses” is the first original musical produced by the theater company CCAE Theatricals, led by songwriter Jordan Beck and J. Scott Lapp. Beck created the concept for the musical, acquired the musical rights for the diaries and co-wrote some of the songs. Lapp is the show’s stage director. The team behind “Witnesses” also worked closely on the musical with a Jewish consultant and historian, as well as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.

One of the young diarists whose story will be told in the musical was 12-year-old David Rabinowitz, who lived in a village near Kielce, Poland. In August 1940, he wrote in his diary: “During the war, I’ve been studying by myself, at home. When I remember that I used to go to school, I feel like crying.” He was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Today, kids get so wrapped up with the little things and they feel like life is so tough,” Beck told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “In this show, the kids are dealing with the same stresses in life, like crushes, not getting good grades and getting into arguments with their siblings and parents. But then on top of that they’re being marginalized. What I found so inspiring was that up until the point they stopped writing, they were still holding on to hope.”




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