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Saturday, July 23, 2022

07/23 Links: Reclaiming Jewish advocacy beyond Zionism; Sharansky urges Russian Jews to move to Israel before possible shutdown; The Top 5 Most Popular Palestinian Terrorists in the West

From Ian:

Reclaiming Jewish advocacy beyond Zionism
Data conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and other leading research centers form the necessary CT scan of the Jewish American body today.

We can see the malaise, identify the various tumors: namely that a vast 73% of American Jews view their Jewish identity as an expression of religion, or that despite a plethora of Jewish teen organizations, Jews are less likely to become involved in Jewish life as adults, and more likely to intermarry (42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse).

And in regards to Israel, American Jewish teens struggle to support and feel affiliation in the midst of a social media propaganda campaign that paints the Jewish nation state as guilty of apartheid and Zionism as racism. We must use catheters – innovative pedagogies – to reach and confront the root of the problem: a generation that is confused about their identities, a generation that unwittingly deploys moral equivalents, a generation that is triggered by the word “truth.”

We are losing the ideological war not because we do not have better social media posts or better counter-arguments; we are losing the war because our children are marinating in a neo-Marxist framework that primes them to view power as evil, or the concept of truth an assault on narrative.

In the past four years that I have been teaching Zionism, I have noticed how rapidly things have deteriorated. If four years ago I could “sell Zionism” and inspire teens to become Zionists, today things are different. And I dare go one step further: selling Zionism has very little to do with Zionism.

Recently I had the privilege of hearing former ambassador Ron Dermer speak to a group of teens. To the question posed by one teen about how to get people to be more pro-Israel, Dermer announced: “When I gauge whether I am dealing with an ally or foe to Israel, I ask two questions and neither have anything to do with Israel or Zionism. First I ask, do you believe in a right and wrong, and second, is America a force of good for the world?”

Let us aim higher, dare to be better by reclaiming western civilization and its moral fabric by teaching that there are fixed axioms such as right and wrong, truth is objective, language shapes reality and that equality and equity comes at a cost to freedom. Dare I say, the solution is not more Zionism, but a reset button: a reclaiming of the morality narrative deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
Natan Sharansky urges Russian Jews to move to Israel before possible shutdown
Russian Jews should move to Israel as soon as possible, former Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky urged on Friday, less than a day after Moscow called for the aliyah organization’s liquidation in Russia.

In a Facebook post, Sharansky, a former “refusenik” who was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for nearly a decade during the late 1970s and early ’80s due to his human rights activism, framed the move as part of the ongoing Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine, which has seen a surge in immigration to Israel from both countries.

“Since the beginning of Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, Israel has taken a cautious stance and offered only limited support to Ukraine,” he wrote, echoing earlier criticism of Jerusalem’s Ukraine policy, which he had previously told Haaretz stemmed from former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s fear to call out Putin.

“In the past days and weeks, Russia, isolated as it is from the free world, strengthened its military and political alliance with Iran and Syria. At the same time, it took steps to stop the operations of the Jewish Agency, the central organization connecting Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora, in its territory,” Sharansky went on to say.

He called Russia’s actions a reminder that Israelis “must protect our interests in ways that don’t rely on relinquishing our moral positions but rather on insisting on upholding them and to join the free world’s fight to stop Russia’s aggression.”

And while the Jewish Agency does important work in Russia, “it behooves us to remember that Israel knew how to fight for immigration even when the Jewish Agency and all Israeli diplomats were barred from Soviet Russia, just as it knew how to defend its security interests successfully even when all the best Soviet weapons were delivered not to us but to our enemies,” he said.

“I want to finish this post with a message to all of our Jewish brethren in Russia who are seriously considering immigrating to Israel: I urge you not postpone the implementation of your plans,” Sharansky added.
Jewish Agency in Russia is secretly planning on relocating to Israel
The Jewish Agency has secretly launched a plan to move its operations in Russia to Israel and to run the aliyah process remotely, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The decision follows the Russian Justice Ministry’s request on Thursday to shut down the agency’s activities in Russia. In the meantime, there will be a court discussion on the case this week, the Post has learned, and until then, the agency is trying to fight its case.

“The Jewish Agency employees are working on packing up, metaphorically, and re-evaluating their challenges and work,” said a source close to the agency.

The understanding is that there is no solution for the complicated legal situation in Russia, and therefore there is a need to create a system that will enable long-distance aliyah applications.

Even though the aliyah process is able to move to an online platform, it won’t be convenient for the elderly, because face-to-face connections will no longer exist.

A source in the agency explained that without the ability to promote aliyah in Russia, the immigration rates will drop dramatically in the coming years.

The agency has just a few Israeli shlichim (emissaries) in Russia and about 100 local employees. It is unclear if there will be a solution for these employees if it is forced to close its operations there.


No, Anne Frank did not have ‘white privilege’
Ever since Otto Frank first published his daughter’s diary 75 years ago, the key message of Anne’s life and death has had a lot of its Judaism removed. Otto — who had lost his entire family — started it, perhaps acknowledging that even in the aftermath, the world wasn’t prepared to face what it had really done.

He expunged many of Anne’s explicitly Jewish passages about things like Yom Kippur, as well as her terrifying accounts of Germans seizing Jews in Amsterdam. The German edition was even worse; German culpability was smoothed over.

The 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank further changed things. Anne’s thoughts about her Judaism and her sister Margot’s Zionist aspirations practically disappeared. Her impassioned thoughts about the Jewish race — “through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but through the ages they’ve gone on living, and centuries of suffering have only made them stronger” — was given the “All Lives Matter” treatment: “We are not the only people that have had to suffer. Sometimes one race… sometimes another.”

The positivity of the Anne story, her belief that, “in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”, is always emphasised. The words that followed these — “there’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill” — are never given as much prominence.

Antisemitism killed Anne. Antisemitism and the fear of it meant that Anne’s explicit Judaism was removed from her story to make it a more universal narrative of redemption. And antisemitism now means that learning about the Holocaust is seen as “Jewish privilege”.

A Jewish friend was recently stunned at the depiction of Anne in a show called Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World. The programme showed what happens when the anti-Jewish racism is taken out.

It said: “During World War II, Jewish people were targeted by the Nazis and taken to prison camps.” The explicit racism of the Nazis, which started several years before World War II, is completely missing. Concentration camps are changed to “prison”.

And organisations which should know better are beginning to fall for this idea of our “white privilege”.

The Anne Frank Trust recently said it was recruiting for “a new strategy targeting young people with lived experience of prejudice”, listing almost every form of prejudice but the one that had killed Anne. It emerged this week that the charity had written that it was “excited to welcome” Nasima Begum, a writer who used phrases about wanting to see “Zionist scum” dead or thrown down wells.

The head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust — who surely should care who is invited to speak by an organisation named after one of the Shoah’s victims — wrote a now-deleted tweet in defence of the decision.

Surely it is not too much to ask that such groups should be thinking about the antisemitism of today as well as that of the past?

Or is that my white Jewish privilege speaking?
Anne Frank Trust admits vetting ‘failure’ after ‘antisemitic’ speaker invited
The Anne Frank Trust has admitted a "failure" in its vetting process after it hosted a speaker who claimed that Israel is committing a "Holocaust" against the Palestinians.

Nasima Begum was invited by the anti-prejudice organisation to lead a workshop in storytelling, despite having made a number of comments in 2011 and 2012 claiming that Israel is committing “genocide” against Palestinians, justifying Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities, and writing to a pro-Israel activist: “death to you Zionist scum”.

In a statement on Thursday entitled “An unreserved apology", the trust announced the outcome of its internal investigation following widespread backlash at Ms Begum’s invitation given previous “antisemitic comments” on social media.

It said that the staff who organised the workshop “did not carry out appropriate due diligence” due to the “haste” in delivering the workshop before the end of the school year.

The trust said unequivocally that this was “a failure in due diligence”, adding that they are introducing new policies and procedures in response, as well as making improvements to their planning process “so that events are organised in a more timely manner”.

It added: “Of particular concern was the offence caused, especially to the Jewish community, by the choice of facilitator. We apologise unreservedly for this.


Gil Hoffman: From Hitler and Stalin to Putin and Raisi: Why Downplaying Evil Is So Dangerous
In her new book, “The Newspaper Axis,” UC Davis history professor Kathryn S. Olmsted writes that many American and British newspapers failed to take the rise of Adolf Hitler seriously in the 1930s.

Olmsted accused six of the most powerful English-language publishers of the World War II era of actively “enabling Hitler,” and using their influence to downplay and even promote his rise. She wrote that William Randolph Hearst, who owned 28 newspapers and a wire service, paid Hitler and his second-in-command, Hermann Göring, to write propaganda for his newspapers.

One reason she cites for this behavior was ongoing support for isolationism and fear of American loss of life should the US get involved in a war in Europe. Moreover, the editorial decisions made by this newspaper axis were fueled by opposition to long-serving President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Olmsted also notes another factor: the newspaper publishers’ antisemitism.

“They espoused conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in government and believed that Jews themselves were to blame for antisemitism,” a Washington Post review of “The Newspaper Axis” states, adding: “So they had little sympathy for European Jews suffering at Hitler’s hands, and they suspected that American Jews were scheming to force the nation into war — an insinuation that appeared routinely in their editorials.”

It is no wonder that even the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which enabled Berlin and Moscow to divide Poland between them, and the September 1940 Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan did not wake up the world.

Fast forward to this week, when Russian President Vladimir Putin chose the Islamic Republic of Iran as his destination for his first trip beyond the former Soviet Union since his invasion of Ukraine in February.
Hijackers, Bombers and Masterminds: The Top 5 Most Popular Palestinian Terrorists in the West
One of the defining characteristics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the use of terrorism by Palestinian organizations and individuals in order to harm Israeli civilians and to further their political goals through violent means.

These terrorist attacks have cost the lives of thousands of Israelis and have left countless others wounded and traumatized.

Despite their role in inflicting violence on innocent civilians, a number of Palestinian terrorists have developed an international following, with activists, artists and academics glorifying their actions and ideas.

The following is a list of the five most popular Palestinian terrorists in the West:

1. Leila Khaled
A member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Leila Khaled took part in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv that was ultimately diverted to Damascus.

A year later, Khaled was part of a two-person team that attempted to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City. During the attack, Khaled removed the pins from the two grenades that she was carrying.

After her partner was killed by Israeli air marshals, Khaled was overpowered by security and taken into custody.

Upon landing at London’s Heathrow Airport, Khaled was taken into British detention. She was released less than a month later in exchange for hostages that had been taken during a separate hijacking.

Leila Khaled currently lives in Amman, Jordan, where she maintains her membership in the PFLP.

Even though Leila Khaled took part in two hijackings that put the lives of hundreds of civilians at risk, she has been internationally glorified for almost half a century by both political activists and artists.

In 1981, the English band The Teardrop Explodes released a song named ‘Like Leila Khaled Said.’

In 2005, Lina Makboul released a film titled ‘Leila Khaled Hijacker,’ where the Swedish-Palestinian filmmaker referred to Khaled as “my idol.”

In 2014, images of Leila Khaled cradling a rifle were painted on two separate wall murals in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In both September 2020 and April 2021, the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program at San Francisco State University invited Leila Khaled to speak online as part of their ‘Whose Narratives?’ program. Both speeches were ultimately abandoned, with the September talk being canceled by Zoom due to the streaming platform’s anti-terrorism policy.
Mavi Marmara flotilla: Spark of an Israel-Turkey diplomatic fallout
Twelve years after the Mavi Marmara incident caused an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between former allies Israel and Turkey, the ties between the two countries are warming up again.

Ankara broke off relations with Jerusalem following a raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound ship trying to break the naval blockade of the Hamas-run enclave. Ten pro-Palestinian Turks who were part of Turkey’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) were killed after they attacked the commandos.

The Mavi Marmara was part of a flotilla heading to the blocked Gaza Strip to deliver humanitarian aid.

It was the largest in a six-vessel convoy that tried to break the siege imposed by both Israel and Egypt that was designed to prevent Hamas and other terror groups from importing weapons and other goods that could help their military build-up.

The blockade was imposed in 2007 after Hamas took over the coastal enclave, making all goods that enter Gaza be imported under Israeli supervision through land crossings. Several ships had, over the years, attempted to break the blockade, but were stopped by the Israeli Navy and those board deported from Israel.

“We can’t let anyone in. If we let one in, we will lose control and if we did that, within three months, we would see Iranian ships in Gaza,” said V.-Adm. (ret.) Eliezer Marom, commander of the Israeli Navy from 2007–2011.

Marom was commander at the time of the Mavi Marmara and, now part of Habithonistim, a movement of Israeli defense officials who advocate for the country’s future security needs, he sat with the Magazine to tell his story.

“I spoke with the Turkish, Greek, and Italian navy chiefs and warned that there could be blood,” he said. “A military operation was our last resort. Violating our maritime borders violates our sovereignty.”
Biden's Trip: A Total Disappointment to Allies
The Islamic Republic of Iran did not murder just one American journalist... in 1983, Iran murdered 241 American servicemen in the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.

To top it off, then in 2018, Iran was ordered by a US federal court to pay billions of dollars in compensation to relatives of victims in the 9/11 attacks that murdered 3,000 people on US soil.

Iran is still holding six Americans hostage... In addition, Iran recently called for the assassination of leading US officials, a story the Biden administration reportedly tried to "keep under wraps," lest it disturb their efforts to enable Iran to acquire nuclear capability along with more than a trillion dollars to revive what has been called, in a scathing analysis by Richard Goldberg, a former National Security Council official and US Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer, "the new worst deal in history."

"Words will not stop them, Mr. President. Diplomacy will not stop them. The only thing that will stop Iran is knowing that if they continue to develop their nuclear program, the free world will use force." — Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, speaking alongside US President Joe Biden at a joint news conference, July 14, 2022.

Iran also now has "over 3,000 [ballistic] missiles of various types," many capable of carrying nuclear warheads — US Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, Jerusalem Post, March 15, 2022.

The Iranian regime has also switched off UN cameras to monitor its nuclear program and announced that it will not allow the IAEA to see images from the devices.

In addition, the Iranian regime is refusing to answer the IAEA's questions about uranium particles found at three clandestine and undeclared nuclear sites in Iran.

The Biden administration not only wants this warmed-over nuclear deal, but also appears eager to throw more billions at a regime that used the last billions to solidify its takeover of four countries: Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

The ruling mullahs of Iran are freely being allowed to violate US sanctions and UN Security Council Resolutions. Shipments of weapons to the Houthis in Yemen are in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2140.

Any revival of a nuclear deal will only enrich what the US State Department has called the "top state sponsor of terrorism": Iran. Since its founding in 1979, the regime has openly called for "Death to America" and "Death to Israel". Or are these results what the Biden administration possibly wants?
Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger PodCast: Our Man in Geneva
Hillel Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch. Like no one else, he keeps an eye on the United Nations, particularly when it comes to human rights. If you care about what the U.N. does with human rights—and usually they do appalling things—then Neuer is your man: your man in Geneva. He is also a broadly thoughtful and experienced man, and Jay asks him some essential questions about his life and work.


J Street-backed congressional candidate defeated in Maryland Democratic primaries
Traditional pro-Israel organizations are celebrating victory in another battle against J Street as former Prince George’s County state’s attorney Glenn Ivey defeated former Rep. Donna Edwards for the Democratic nomination for Maryland’s 4th Congressional District.

Ivey won with 51.2% of the primary vote to Edwards’s 35.1%, with former Maryland House of Delegates member Angela Angel coming in third with 6%.

Ivey is set to run later this year for the open, largely black suburb vacated by Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.) against Republican primary winner Jeff Warner, a pastor.

The race for the safe Democratic district was seen as a proxy war between pro-Israel organizations such as the liberal J Street, which supported Edwards, versus organizations such as AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) and Pro-Israel America (PIA), which all backed Ivey.

“We are proud to have helped pro-Israel progressive Democrat Glenn Ivey defeat his anti-Israel opponent,” AIPAC tweeted on Wednesday. “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.”


Former Hamas minister injured in West Bank ‘assassination attempt’
Nasser al-Shaer, a prominent Hamas-affiliated Palestinian academic who previously served as a minister in the Palestinian Authority government, was shot by unidentified gunmen on Friday afternoon.

The shooting took place in the village of Kufr Kalil near Nablus, where Shaer, 61, was attending the wedding of a Palestinian man who had been released from Israeli prison after serving time for security-related offenses.

Shaer, who was hit by six bullets in his legs, was rushed to Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus, where doctors said that he was in moderate condition.

The shooting, which has been described by Hamas and other Palestinian groups as an “assassination attempt,” came a month after he was physically assaulted during clashes between students aligned with Hamas and the ruling Fatah faction headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas at An-Najah University in Nablus.

Shaer teaches sharia (Islam’s legal system) at the university.


Iran Says it Detains Israel-Linked Network Planning Sabotage
Iran said on Saturday its security forces had arrested a network of agents working for Israel before they were able to carry out sabotage and “terrorist operations,” state media reported.

The announcement by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry came amid heightening tensions with arch-enemy Israel over Tehran’s nuclear program.

“This network’s members were in contact with (Israel’s) Mossad spy agency through a neighboring country and entered Iran from (Iraq’s) Kurdistan region with advanced equipment and strong explosives,” the ministry said in a statement carried by state media.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, which oversees Mossad, declined to comment.

Iran often accuses its enemies or rivals abroad, such as Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia, of trying to destabilize the country.

The Intelligence ministry did not say how many people were arrested and did not divulge their nationality. The network planned “acts of sabotage and unprecedented terrorist operations in sensitive locations,” its statement said, without giving details.


Civil Rights Complaint Alleges ‘Pattern of Antisemitism’ at CUNY
The City University of New York (CUNY) is the subject of a new Title VI complaint with the US Department of Education alleging that it has intentionally ignored “a sustained pattern of antisemitism.”

Filed on Tuesday by the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), it follows accusations of antisemitism at CUNY campuses aired during a New York City Council hearing on the issue last month, held after the CUNY School of Law faculty endorsed a boycott of Israel.

“Some of the harassment on CUNY campuses has become so commonplace as to almost be normalized,” the ACLJ’s complaint alleged. “Attacking, denigrating, and threatening ‘Zionists’ has become the norm, with the crystal-clear understanding that ‘Zionist’ is now merely an epithet for ‘Jew’ the same way ‘banker,’ ‘cabal,’ ‘globalist,’ ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘Christ killer,’ and numerous other such dog-whistles have been used over the centuries to target, demonize, and incite against Jews.”

The complaint recounted a number of alleged incidents at CUNY going as far back as 2013, including Jewish faculty and students having their property vandalized, receiving threats and verbal abuse, and being held responsible for actions of the Israeli government.

The brief also discussed a 2021 resolution passed by the public university system’s faculty union accusing Israel of practicing apartheid, a measure that prompted the resignations of a number of Jewish members, as well as the more recent boycott effort endorsed at the law school.


New York Times Ignores Its Own Investigation of Journalist Slain in Jenin
A New York Times staff editorial on “What Biden Got Right on His Trip to the Middle East,” reports, “Given the situation in Israel, there is little Mr. Biden can do to breathe life into the moribund peace process, and the visit took place just a couple of months after the death of a popular journalist and American citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was killed while covering an Israeli military operation in the West Bank, and Palestinians are convinced that she was deliberately shot. They do not buy the State Department’s conclusion that while the bullet was likely fired by an Israeli, there was ‘no reason to believe that this was intentional.’”

This wasn’t merely the State Department’s conclusion. It was, pretty much, the New York Times’ conclusion. The Times did its own elaborate investigation of the death, carrying the names of no fewer than eight named Times journalists, and concluded in part, “The Times found no evidence that the person who fired recognized Ms. Abu Akleh and targeted her personally. The Times was unable to determine whether the shooter saw that she and her colleagues were wearing protective vests emblazoned with the word Press.” That part of the Times investigation, unlike other parts of it, hasn’t yet been subject to factual corrections. Yet the editorial-writing staff didn’t deem it worth mentioning.

Instead, the editorial just reports the Palestinians are convinced of something, without doing the necessary journalistic work of adding context and perspective. The Times frequently bends over backward to provide this sort of independent fact-checking, sometimes even heavy-handedly, when it comes to claims about US election outcomes or public health matters. But when it comes to Palestinian accusations against Israel, no claim is too wild, inflammatory, or unverified for the Times to pass along. It’s the latest in a flurry of negative Times coverage that kicked in after a street protest outside the newspaper’s Manhattan headquarters called for harsher coverage of Israel, accusing the Times of being “complicit in colonial violence.”
Joy Reid’s Incendiary Charge Against Israel
On July 13, during a segment featuring Peter Beinart on The ReidOut, host Joy Reid asserted, “So you have the Israel piece, where you have Shireen Abu Akleh who was murdered…”

The use of the term “murdered” inappropriately and inaccurately presented her personal opinion, or perhaps speculation, as a statement of fact.

While it is not disputed that Akleh was killed during an Israeli operation in the town of Jenin, during which gun battles erupted between Israeli and Palestinian forces, there is no definitive evidence of who shot Akleh.

Much of the evidence regarding the source of the bullet that killed Akleh remains unclear and contradictory. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority’s investigation claimed the bullet came from a type of rifle the Israeli Defense Forces do not even use.

Even less clear is the suggestion that it was “murder.”

As even the New York Times acknowledged, it “found no evidence that the person who fired recognized Ms. Abu Akleh and targeted her personally” and “was unable to determine whether the shooter saw that she and her colleagues were wearing protective vests emblazoned with the word Press.”

That the death occurred during a situation of ongoing armed engagements between the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian terrorist groups, including the inevitable “fog of war” that occurs in such contexts, raises additional questions that must be considered before an allegation of “murder” can be reasonably made, even if the bullet is ultimately tied to an Israeli soldier or Palestinian gunman.
Fourth time's the charm as Calexico returns to Israel
Like his seemingly eternally optimistic nature, Joey Burns looks back on the lockdowns and isolation of the COVID era as having positive elements.

The 50-something co-founder and frontman for Calexico, one of the United States’ most accomplished bands, explains that the separation from his bandmates enabled them to regroup and record one of their best albums in their 30 years together: El Mirador.

“We had to be very patient and wait for everyone to get vaccinated and make sure it was safe to get together,” Burns told The Jerusalem Post from his home in Boise, Idaho, where he recently moved after 27 years in Tucson, Arizona.

“Before that, we even managed to put out a holiday album at the end of 2020, which we all did remotely from our homes. The following summer, we started working in person.”

In June 2021, Burns flew back to Tucson, where band multi-instrumentalist Sergio Mendoza had built a backyard home studio. Calexico’s drummer, co-founder and Burns’ partner John Covertino, flew in with his kit from his home in El Paso, Texas.

“It was incredible. We met, hung out, laughed and worked on a lot of music. We recorded musical sketches of some 30 songs and honed in to complete 12 of them for El Mirador,” said Burns.

The result is a new chapter for the band, which has led a sprawling musical adventure with a rustic desert base to springboard into everything from lo-fi rock and Springsteenian Americana to spaghetti western noir, mariachi and Portuguese Fado. El Mirador contains a healthy dose of south-of-the-border accents and vibes, something that Burns said was intentional.

“In some ways, we wanted to give the record a more festive and celebratory, dynamic feel. Our live shows have a lot more Latin and upbeat rhythms, and some fans commented how they would like to see more of that on record. It was a great idea and, especially coming out of the pandemic, we get the point that the best way to bring people together is through music that celebrates life.”
16 things you didn’t know about the Maccabiah Games
This is going to be huge: About 10,000 youth and adult athletes from 65 countries in Israel to compete in 3,000 events in 42 sports during the 21st Maccabiah, July 12-26.

The Maccabiah is the third-largest sporting event in the world by number of competitors, after the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. This summer’s games will be held at venues in 18 Israeli cities.

Normally, the Maccabiah takes place every four years. But the 2021 games were postponed – like so many other things – due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Ahead of this exciting sports event, ISRAEL21c gathered some interesting and fun facts about the Maccabiah:
1. The idea for the Maccabiah was conceived by 15-year-old Joseph Yekutieli in 1912 in response to a lack of international competitions available to Jewish athletes. It took years to develop and gain support for his plan. When the first games took place in 1932, Yekutieli participated in the cycling competition.
2. Though it’s often referred to as the Jewish Olympics and is organized by the Maccabi World Union, an international Jewish sports organization with 400 clubs in 80 countries, the Maccabiah is open not only to Jewish athletes but also to Israeli athletes of any religion.
3. The name Maccabiah honors the ancient Maccabees, a family of Jewish warriors who rebelled against the Syrian-Greek conquerors and rededicated the defiled Second Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE — leading to the institution of the Hanukkah holiday. Modi’in, the home of the Maccabees, is the starting location of the torch that lights the flames at the opening Maccabiah ceremony.
4. Maccabiah torches will be carried by five Israeli athletes: Tokyo Olympic medalist Avishag Semberg, swimmer Anastasia Gorbenko, Paralympic swimmers Mark Malyar and Iyad Shalabi and baseball player Ian Kinsler.
From a spy’s son to ambassador to Egypt: Itzhak Levanon’s story
KISHIK WAS born in Argentina but moved with her parents to Israel when she was a young child. At the age of 16, a match was made between her and a wealthy Lebanese businessman who took his young bride back to Beirut to live. The couple settled, had seven children, became leading members of the Lebanese Jewish community, and developed close ties with Lebanese officials.

On the eve of the War of Independence, Shula made contact with intelligence officers of the Jewish state in the making and began passing on information. She was given a code name: “The Pearl.”

After the war Cohen-Kishik was instrumental in smuggling thousands of Jews out of Syria and Lebanon and into Israel, until it all came crashing down one horrible August day in 1961, when she was arrested and accused of treason.

Levanon chronicles his mother’s tale in his new book, In the Eye of the Storm, Clandestine Diplomacy (Hebrew). But the book does not stop with his mother’s story or how the family left Lebanon and came to Israel after she was released in an Israel-Lebanon prisoner exchange following the Six Day War.

Rather, the book then follows Levanon’s career from Arab affairs adviser to legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, whom he calls his mentor, to the Foreign Ministry’s cadets corps, to postings in New York, Venezuela, Paris, Montreal, Boston, Geneva and – the cherry on his diplomatic career – as ambassador to Egypt from 2009 to 2011.

The boy from the Jewish quarter in Beirut, unceremoniously kicked out of the country of his birth with the rest of his family in 1967, was dispatched 42 years later to Cairo to serve as Israel’s ambassador to the most important Arab state. Levanon wrote that the first time he saw the Israeli flag was at the Israeli Embassy in Cyprus where he flew from Lebanon on the way to be reunited with his mother following the prisoner exchange in 1967. He cried at the sight of the flag.

He said the other time he cried when seeing the flag was when he presented his credentials to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at a ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Cairo, as “Hatikvah” was being played.




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