Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: book review

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Sunday, August 01, 2021

Book Review: Nevergreen, by Andrew Pessin

In 2017, at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, students decided on modifying their annual racism-awareness "Day of Absence," to expect white students and faculty to stay away from campus and allow only people of color to attend.

One professor of biology, Bret Weinstein, was offended as a liberal for an event where skin color determines who is allowed and not allowed in campus spaces. He wrote a letter protesting the event, and taught his class as usual, and all his students of all races attended without incident.

Weeks later, his letter was publicized and Weinstein went through an Orwellian experience: demonstrations broke out on campus, students chanted his name and called for his resignation. Weinstein tried to speak out, to explain his reasoning, and was not allowed to speak. The next day, as he rode his bike to campus, he saw students taking out their cell phones as he passed by. As he told Haaretz recently, “I thought, what is this? Is this some kind of ambush? And so I rode around to a different entrance to campus and went to the police station. The police were locked inside. They unlocked the door and let me in. And I said to the chief of police: ‘I must be imagining things, but I think that there were people waiting for me.’ She said, ‘I don’t think you were imagining anything. In fact, you’re not safe on your bike. Not only here on campus, but anywhere in town. If they were to catch up to you, I don’t think we could help you.’ ...As I rode back to my house, I was thinking: This can’t be happening in the United States. I’m a civilian who’s incapable of getting protection from the police from a mob of people who have mistaken me for a racist. "

This is a world that Andrew Pessin knows well. He himself was the object of a similar witch-hunt in 2015 when an anti-Israel student at Connecticut College dug up an old Facebook post of his, claimed that it was dehumanizing to Palestinians and started a series of events where Pessin was accused of racism and put in a situation where he couldn't defend himself.

Now, Pessin has written a novel about the toxic atmosphere on campuses today named Nevergreen, an obvious spoof on Evergreen College. Like Evergreen, Nevergreen is in the Pacific Northwest, but it is on an island which used to house an insane asylum.

The story is about a physician, only named "J.", who is convinced to give a guest lecture on an obscure topic at Nevergreen College by a chance encounter with its dean.

As we soon find out, the inmates - in this case, the students - run the asylum.

J. ends up giving his lecture to a completely empty room. Yet the next day, he is caught up in a rumor that he said something very offensive, the bored editor of the school newspaper blows up the story and J. finds himself literally running for his life and unable to leave. The faculty is as crazy as the students are; some are trying to out-woke the students while deathly afraid of being denounced by them. Even seeming allies of J. turn against him as the rumors about his lecture take on a life of their own and he literally becomes the "face of hate."

The book is part comedy and part horror story. From J.'s perspective, he is in real danger, since one cannot distinguish between sanity and insanity at Nevergreen. Yet it is clear to the reader, if not J., that most of the students are just idiots who want to party and get laid, while some really are dangerous - and to someone being "canceled," it is diffcult to tell the difference.

Unlike other horror stories, the monster's motives cannot be discerned, because there are multiple monsters - groups of students at cross-purposes who cancel people for differing reasons or no reasons whatsoever, faculty members who are frightened of their own charges, and others who want to use the resulting chaos for their own personal gain.

Nevergreen College is so committed to diversity that even Nazis are allowed to have their own student club. But one group of people are conspicuous by their absence - Jews. Pessin hints broadly at a sinister backstory, where a few years earlier the campus was rocked by an unexplained "episode," that followed students going to the Middle East to help bring peace between warring factions and who get slaughtered for their efforts. (It is not coincidence that Pessin gave the newspaper editor the name "Corrie," after another famous former Evergreen student.) The book doesn't say what the "episode" was, but the absence of Jews on campus indicates something terrible happened that drove them out. There are reminders of Jews everywhere, even if the Jews themselves are left unmentioned. Even research into Jewish topics must be done secretly.

The extreme tolerance for all viewpoints has its limits at Nevergreen. As usual, one group is outside the pale for everyone.

Nevergreen is really good, often hilarious but it is an uneasy humor; the happenings on the fictional bizarro Nevergreen campus are uncomfortably close to what is really happening today at many colleges. It is a world that Pessin knows well, where sanity is not a virtue and may in fact be a thoughtcrime.

The book will be available on September 1, and you can preorder it here.

Here is its video trailer.

Book review: "The Netanyahus: An Account..." (fiction)

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, by Joshua Cohen, is a story about the only Jewish professor at the fictional Corbin College was forced to host Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his family (which included his sons Yonatan, Bibi and Iddo) for his interview.

The plot is thin, but Cohen's writing is a joy to read. Writing as the professor Ruben Blum, the book is filled with sly asides and observations as well as a profligate vocabulary.

Blum is an assimilated Jew who cannot escape his Jewishness. The only reason he is placed on the committee to evaluate Netanyahu is because he is Jewish. he is embarrassed to have the only house in his adopted town of Corbindale not to have a Christmas wreath.

When Ben-Zion Netanyahu arrives with his thoroughly Israeli family, Nathan and his wife Edith are shocked at their rudeness as they take over the house, making long-distance calls, using the washing machine, changing their youngest on the counter without asking permission. (One of the few missteps that Cohen makes is assuming that Pampers existed in 1960.)

Netanyahu's academic career was centered on proving that Jews were always treated as Jews no matter what they did. His major work centered on the Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain - most of whom, he claims, converted willingly - and how the Spanish Inquisition persecuted them anyway, being the first to treat Jews as a race and not just a religion. To Ben-Zion, one cannot escape being a Jew no matter how hard one tries; the antisemites will go after you no matter what.

Even though Cohen is not a fan of the real Netanyahus - his afterword makes that clear - the point of the book is that Ben-Zion is right, that Judaism is not something one can run away from, even if some Jews are uncouth, blunt, rude and pushy.

One of the many observations made was that in 1960s, Jews in the US were all trying to become as American as possible and leave Judaism behind, while in Israel the Jews were trying to all become Israeli and homogenize their Judaism. All Jews were moving to become something else.

The Netanyahus is an often funny book, poking fun at the assimilationist American Jews as much as the overbearing Israelis. The Blum's daughter Judy would ask her maternal grandmother, who was all about appearing cultured, whether she had seen gallery openings or poetry readings of people from the Andrew Jackson administration and she would answer that of course she did; Blum's wife asks the baffled Netanyahus to take off their shoes when they enter her house and Ben-Zion ("Son of Zion") has a hole in his sock showing his big toe; the Netanyahus take no responsibility for anything they do wrong, blaming others.

Cohen's writing is virtuosic. The Netanyahus is a fun read and it brings up a number of issues about the differences between American and Israeli Jewry that are still relevant.

Book Review: Reaching for Comfort by Sherri Mandell (Judean Rose)

Reaching for Comfort: What I Saw, What I Learned, & How I Blew it Training as a Pastoral Counselor, is the third of three books by Sherri Mandell on dealing with the loss of her son Koby Mandell, to terror. But know that Mandell is a writer by profession, and not by circumstance. She writes because that’s her gift: it’s what she does. The fact that she can not only write but has a heartbreaking story to tell, makes it all the more poignant to read her story, and hear her “voice.”

It’s difficult—even gut-wrenching—to read these works, but some would say, necessary. This is a human rights issue. Jews, like all other people, should have the right to live productive lives in peace, in particular in their indigenous territory. Jewish children, like all other children, should have the right to grow up unmolested by terror, no matter where they live.

In this new book, in which Mandell speaks of her experiences training as a pastoral counselor, we hear the voice of a mother who longs for comfort, who is seeking something to give her relief or at least a small respite from the feelings she goes to bed with at night, and wakes up to every morning. It is obvious to all who witness this sort of pain, even from the outside looking in: the pain of losing a child to terror never, ever leaves you. This book helps us see what this might be like, God forbid, even if only to the smallest degree (may we never need to understand it fully).

Mandell takes us along as she begins to visit hospitalized patients as part of her training. This takes place at a time when pastoral counseling is new to the scene of Israeli patient care. Many of the patients fail to understand the purpose of her visits and are reluctant to avail themselves of what she attempts to offer them. One understands that Mandell thought she'd be good at pastoral counseling by dint of her experiences as the mother of a terror victim. Her efforts at comforting patients and their families, on the other hand, tend not to have the desired effect.

Interspersed with Mandell's visits to patients (whom she describes as "fictional composites, drawn broadly from real stories") are her training sessions and meetings with Michael, her mentor and co-teacher of the pastoral counseling course. Michael leads the group through prayers and exercises, during which Mandell always seems to fall short in comparison with her classmates. Mandell's self-described inadequacies as a pastoral counselor are as puzzling to the reader as they are to Mandell. Her descriptions of her visits to patients, meanwhile, are compelling, and we know something they do not: that she is Sherri Mandell, mother of Koby Mandell, who was murdered in a brutal attack when he was only 13.

An Added Dimension

For this writer, there is an added dimension to this story of an effort to comfort others in the midst of grief. Having lived in Gush Etzion for a long time, through both intifadas, I remember when Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran were murdered. There was a media blackout at first, but we understood that children had been murdered in Tekoa, a settlement in our area. And of course, the Gush was a much smaller community in those days than it is now, and everyone knew everyone in the Gush.

We wanted to know what had happened, so we began making calls to people we knew in Tekoa. We wanted to be there for the parents, to mourn alongside them. We wanted to learn from what happened in order to understand what measures we needed to take in our attempts to protect our own children going forward. It took only two phone calls to learn the identity of the two boys who had been murdered, and the terrible details of the attack. It was, in fact, a child who told me—the child of a friend—what had happened and to whom.

It was Sherri and Seth Mandell’s story. It was Koby’s story, and it was Yosef’s story. And yet, in a sense, it was everyone’s story, in that it affected us all, as residents of the Gush, as Jews. The knowledge of what happened turned me into a hyper-vigilant mother. I told the daycare workers that under no circumstances were they allowed to let my children walk home alone, though it was a very short walk from the daycare center to our caravan. And yet, years later, reading Sherri Mandell’s books, you realize it’s not your story, but her story, and hers alone to tell.

Our responsibility, it seems, is to read every word of her elegant prose.

Koby Mandell (H"YD) with his parents Seth and Sherri, at his bar mitzvah, the last birthday he lived to see.

I spoke with Sherri to learn more about her new book:

Varda Epstein: Your first book, “The Blessings of a Broken Heart,” was the story of what happened to your son and the blessings you recognized in the face of tragedy. Your second book, “The Road to Resilience: From Chaos to Celebration” was about how to find a way forward after tragedy. This third book you’ve “birthed” is more difficult to define. How would you summarize “Reaching for Comfort?”

Sherri Mandell: “Reaching for Comfort” is the story of a year training to be a pastoral counselor, being taught how to be present in the face of suffering.

Varda Epstein: When did you first hear about the pastoral counseling course? What did you imagine you would get out of your training?

Sherri Mandell: A friend told me about the course. I thought that I would learn to be comfortable with prayer and become a more serene, centered person. I thought that I would also confront death and illness and see how people coped. I think my main goal was to find a lamed vavnik [one of the 36 righteous people in every generation who wander among us in secret. V.E.] who would tell me the secret of suffering. Of course, I also wanted to be able to have the therapeutic skills to lead the foundation where we worked with so many bereaved children and families.

Varda Epstein: Your book is about pastoral counseling for those with serious or terminal illness and their families. You’ve lost family in the natural way, to age and illness, and you’ve lost a child to terror. How are these experiences different and how are they the same?

Sherri Mandell: Loss is a common denominator for all people, because everybody dies. But there is a difference when somebody is murdered by terrorists, because the family is left with a need to seek justice. Also trauma leaves scars that the loss of a parent in old age does not.

Koby at his bar mitzvah with his father, Rabbi Seth Mandell

Varda Epstein: What would you like people to understand about what it is like to lose a child to terror?

Sherri Mandell: That the pain never goes away.

Varda Epstein: In “Reaching for Comfort” you offer a vivid description of your grief as a sort of underworld: “Even though you have the ability to exit the underworld, you are not sure you want to. In fact, you no longer no which world you belong in or which world you prefer. The ordinary world is no longer hospitable in some ways: it’s too light, too trivial. The underworld has the gravity, the shock, the darkness, the weight of being you crave.”

Do you think your children feel the same way? Have you tried to keep them out of this “underworld?” Tried to give them normalcy? How do you find the balance between giving them a normal childhood, and letting them grieve?

Sherri Mandell: I think that all children who experience tragedy touch the underworld and are changed by the experience.

Koby, laughing with his younger siblings, long before the brutal murder that robbed them of their big brother.

Varda Epstein: Arnold Roth, father of Malki Roth, murdered in the Sbarro massacre, related that people crossed the street to avoid him and his wife after the tragedy. Did you experience anything like this? Do you sometimes feel like you’re wearing a sign?

Sherri Mandell: No, I did not feel that at all. I think because I live in a Yishuv [settlement, V.E.], everybody was involved and everybody cared. I had a feeling of being cocooned by my neighbors and also supported.

Varda Epstein: The website for Koby Mandell Foundation speaks of healing and rebuilding. Is it really possible to heal and rebuild after losing a family member to a terror attack? How would you define healing and rebuilding in this context?

Sherri Mandell: One must rebuild after a tragedy. I realized that when you undergo a tragedy it’s like your vessel is broken. The way you looked at the world, the way you thought, the things you did. They’re no longer sufficient to keep you afloat. You need to build a new vessel somehow, you need to recreate yourself in the light of what you have suffered.

Like most boys born in the U.S., Koby loved baseball.

Varda Epstein: Pastoral counseling may not have been the right path for you, but what is the right path for us to take in order to comfort the family members of terror victims? Is there anything we can say or do that can help?

Sherri Mandell: Pastoral counseling was the right path for me at the time. I think that anytime anyone remembers Koby, it is a good feeling. I think that others can try to be there at important times like the azkara [annual memorial service, V.E.], for example. Or just leave a message that you’re thinking about the person and you remember and you care. The best is when somebody does something to memorialize Koby.

Varda Epstein: What will you write about next?

Sherri Mandell: Good question. I’m working on a novel!

***

Sherri Mandell won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for The Blessings of a Broken Heart. Her newest book, Reaching for Comfort, is available at the Ben Yehuda Press and on Amazon.

Book review: The Taming of the Jew, by Tuvia @Tenenbom

There is an old joke about two Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad in Czarist Russia. One tells the other that he is going to request a last cigarette, and the other says, "No! Don't make trouble!"

That is how the Jews of the UK sound in Tuvia Tenenbom's latest book, The Taming of the Jew.

The book repeats his style of his previous books - part Borat, part Columbo, but always keenly intelligent, Tenenbom travels the world with genuine curiosity to meet all kinds of people and to get them to reveal how they really feel.

In this book, he visits the United Kingdom, where he meets a serious challenge: British people don't tell the truth. A fan of theatre, Tenenbom recognizes that the reason the British are such wonderful actors on stage is because they hone their skills all their lives, rarely revealing their true feelings, and many times in this book he listens to British people saying things that are the exact opposite of the truth.

Tenenbom's journey came as the UK was grappling with Brexit and the Labour Party was grappling with its own antisemitism issues. Others have done excellent reviews of the book and there is a lot there - it is far longer than his other books.

I would like to concentrate on what he reveals about the Jewish community in Great Britain.

The first Jews he meets are small communities in Ireland, Scotland and Leeds. As he writes about the elderly Leeds community, at first they tell him that everything is great, "but if you continue talking to them, they tell you that everything is a disaster."

In Manchester, there is a significant Jewish community, thousands strong. Tenenbom asks a couple at a pizza shop if they ever heard of any antisemitism there, and they say, not at all. He then asked their eight year old son who responded that he and a friend were pelted with eggs recently because they were Jews.

The father sheepishly admitted that it was true, and then said, "What do you want me to do? If I tell you about the antisemitic attacks that we experience here, you'll write about them, inviting copycats, and more people will attack us. If I tell you that everything's good, hopefully it will be good."

That is a serious level of fear and denial. And later Tenenbom finds out that two kosher restaurants in Manchester were firebombed and spent months rebuilding. Tenenbom hears similar stories about kosher restaurants in Golders Green, the Jewish section of London. (When I visited Golders Green one weekend in the 1990s, the synagogues there were already fortresses, way before US shuls started worrying about shootings and bombings.)

I follow the news fairly closely and I was not aware of these firebombings. It seems the Jews don't want to make trouble.

In Gateshead, where there is a major yeshiva, the Jews live in absolute fear. The Jewish bookstore keeps its shutter down all the time; Jews are attacked all the time on the streets in similar ways we saw religious Jews attacked in Brooklyn. The Gateshead yeshiva itself does not allow anyone in without authorization.

The contrast between the security at the synagogues Tenenbom visits and the mosques, which are wide open, couldn't be clearer. Many British synagogues are fortresses and often do not even display their names on the outside. The world talks about Islamophobia but the houses of worship shows who really is in danger.

One other alarming episode is an interview with Lord Stone of Blackheath, who is Jewish. He is more forthcoming than most of the Jews interviewed. He is not close to right wing - he is working on a plan for Jews and Palestinians to join a federation, he has experts working on the constitution for such a Frankenstate, he thinks it is the best chance for peace. He won't directly address the Labour Party antisemitism issue, but then he says something shocking: "I have a bag which I carry everywhere. In it I have my passport nd twenty-seven different currencies. If I had to leave tomorrow, I'd go. I'm 76 and I've lived here for 76 years and I'm a member of the House of Lords and yet.....That's why I've got a flat in Jerusalem."

A Jewish Lord does not feel at home in the country he has lived in his entire life.

(Yesterday, the London Shomrim released a horrific video of a pregnant woman being attacked because she was Jewish. Tenenbom keeps the tone light, but the hate of Jews in the UK is real and dangerous.)

Tenenbom also notes how ubiquitous Palestinian flags and murals are, especially in Ireland. When he speaks to Irish people nearly all of them express hate and disgust for Israel and love of Palestinians. When Tenenbom presses them for details, they know less than nothing about Israelis nor about the Palestinians they show such solidarity with. The Palestinian issue is an excuse to hate Jews and feel righteous about it, that's all. It is proof positive that anti-Zionism is often a thin excuse for good old fashioned Jew-hatred. It is notable thatTenenbom interview a number of Jewish politicians who agree with the IHRA working definition of antisemitism but are unwilling to apply it to, say, Jeremy Corbin.

Is Tenenbom's characterization of Jews as a group that is too scared to stand up for themselves accurate? To an extent. He did interview Rachel Riley, who didn't grow up with that fear and is now an outspoken voice against antisemitism. There are other Jews in England who are not afraid to make waves with their unabashed support of Israel. But it is hard to escape the fact that so many Jews clearly are scared out of their wits, acting like the pre-war Jews in Russia and Europe who went to great lengths to "not make trouble."

It never works.

The Taming of the Jew is as funny, entertaining, and maddening as Tenenbom's other books, and it must be read.

Book Review: Galilee Gold by Susie Aziz Pam (Judean Rose)

Galilee Gold is the kind of book you can’t put down. I started reading the book on a Friday night after supper, read late into the night, picked up where I’d left off the next morning, and had read the entire book—cover to cover—by 11 AM, just in time to sit down for Sabbath lunch. Not bad for this first effort—a novel that is part historical fiction, part romance—from author Susie Aziz Pam.

The story outlined in Galilee Gold takes place in the 18^th century and is based on the life of Daher el-Omar, a powerful figure of the time. El-Omar was a self-proclaimed Bedouin king who encouraged Jewish settlement in the Galilee. In Pam’s skillful hands, el-Omar’s tolerance for the Jews leads to romance when el Omar falls hard for the niece of a Syrian Jewish family under his protection.

The Jewish heroine of the book, Tamar, is of course, beautiful, with a fiery nature and golden hair. It’s no wonder that el-Omar is smitten, though I admit I was discomfited by the concept of a Bedouin-Jewish romance—especially since this is fiction: it never actually happened.

That being the case, why imagine a romance between a Jewish woman and a Bedouin king? Because it makes for darned good reading, even if I didn’t like the concept in theory. And make no mistake: I devoured this book and hope that Galilee Gold is only the first of many books to come from the pen of Susie Aziz Pam.

I spoke to Susie Pam to learn more:

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us a bit about your upbringing, your family, and how and when you came to make Aliyah?

Susie Aziz Pam

Susie Pam: My family were kind of nomads. Both my parents were Persian Jews, from the Mesh'adi community. Mesh'adi Jews were known for keeping the mitzvoth inside their homes, while practicing Islam on the outside—but that is the subject of my next book.

My father's family lived in the Bukharan Quarter in Jerusalem, where their house stands to this day. My mother's family lived in London. After seeking their fortune in London, New York, South Africa, and New York again, my parents settled in Kew Gardens, Queens. We are a very Zionistic family and all of my father's family remained in Israel. So a few years after the Six Day War, in the wave of pro-Israel sentiment, my parents moved to Jerusalem, giving me just enough time to finish high school in New York.

1925 photo of the ancestral Aziz home in the Bukharan Quarter of Jerusalem

Varda Epstein: Can you talk about how you came to write this story? How did you come to hear about Daher el-Omar? Why did this story beckon to you?

Susie Pam: We first met Daher el-Omar when we visited the Yehiam Fortress. The little I found out about el-Omar then, made him stand out like a Disney character: he traded with pirates, he fought off the Ottomans, and he crowned himself the King of the Galilee. But after I began to read up on him, I discovered an amazing fact—el-Omar invited the Jewish communities from Turkey and Syria to settle in the Holy Land. "Return and inherit the land of your forefathers!"

Yehiam Fortress

Inside Yehiam Fortress

Varda Epstein: Who was el-Omar? What was he like?

Susie Pam: Daher el-Omar was the son of the local tax-collector in the Galilee. His vision of Moslems, Christians, and Jews living together and prospering in the eighteenth century, made him a very tolerant and pluralistic leader.

Varda Epstein: Is there any evidence that el-Omar had a romance with a Jewish woman or took a Jewish wife?

Susie Pam: Not to my knowledge. He had many wives and many sons. I only deal with two of his wives in my novel. At the very end of his life, when he was in his 80's, he had a young wife from Russia, who was blond and blue eyed. Legend has it, that the Ottomans attacked Acco (Acre) and he went back to save this wife, and he was killed. But I do not cover that part of his life in my book.

Susie with her two daughters, this past summer. The author also has two sons.

Varda Epstein: How long did it take you to write Galilee Gold, your first novel?

Susie Pam: Well, when I first started I had brown hair and now it’s gray! It took me a good many years—mainly because I wrote most of the chapters in my writing group in Jerusalem, and we only met once a week! Also, when I started writing, there was not a lot of available information about that period—now there is a lot more.

The whole Pam family (see what I did there?)

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us about some of the research involved in writing this work of historical fiction?

Susie Pam: Let's just say that over the last few years, I sent a lot of $5 donations to Wikipedia. My husband is a tour guide and he had a few books in which el-Omar is mentioned. I wrote about herbalism during that period, so I had to read up on plants and their uses, and which were available in the Middle East. My daughter studied herbalism, so I was also able to ask her questions. When I reached a point where I had a lot of questions, we went back up to the Galilee and I found a tour guide whose specialty is Daher el-Omar.

We arranged to meet Sharif Sharif, a heritage and conservation expert of Nazareth. He introduced us to Ziad Daher Zaydany—an architect and artist who drew a portrait of el-Omar and is one of his many descendants. Of course, I imagined him a little more handsome and dashing in his younger days than he appears in the portrait.

Daher el-Omar portrait painted by Ziad Zaydany in 1990

Varda Epstein: Without giving away too much in the way of spoilers, your fictional Jewish heroine Tamar, is depicted as el-Omar’s captive. Do you think it likely that if the story had been true, the Jewish community would have made an effort to ransom and reclaim her? How important is the concept of ransoming a captive in Jewish law?

Susie Pam: Traditionally, ransoming a captive is a very important concept, even today—and I believe the Jews of Aleppo would have made an effort to raise the funds needed to rescue Tamar, had it been feasible.

Varda Epstein: What’s next up for Susie Pam?

Susie Pam: I have another three books in the works—at different stages of completion. Two are historical fiction, and one is a story about an American girl who volunteers on a kibbutz—a traditional kibbutz from the old days—and decides to stay.

***

Galilee Gold is currently available at Booklocker and Amazon.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Book Review: Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities

Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, by Cary Nelson, is a book-length research paper that exposes the true threats to academic freedom in Palestinian territories.

Unlike what BDS activists claim, the problem is not Israel.

For this book, Nelson has expanded one chapter of his masterful Israel Denial book into this comprehensive treatment of the subject of how Palestinian students have no academic freedom at all, at least when it comes to political speech about Israel and Palestinian leaders.

He describes how the (very) few Palestinian scholars who are moderate in wanting dialogue with Israel have been threatened and nearly killed, noting that pro-Hamas academics are also threatened in the West Bank.

Palestinians like to claim that the annual elections of student bodies at their universities are proxies for regular elections that haven’t been held for 17 years and show how important democratic processes are to them. In fact, these elections are accompanied with intimidation, threats, violence and even armed interference by the Palestinian Authority (and, by proxy, Hamas) to push their own student groups to lead the campus.

Palestinian academia is a fun-house mirror of American liberal campuses. If a professor says something that makes students uncomfortable, he or she can be threatened by students much more directly and physically than today’s cancel culture.

In Gaza, the idea of academic freedom is a sad joke. All students at Islamic University of Gaza must take one full year of Islamist indoctrination courses.

One amazing section of the book shows an IUG literature class dissecting a humorous children’s poem by British poet Roger McGough called The Cat’s Protection League about a feline protection racket. The students are prompted and encouraged to interpret the poem in the most outrageous antisemitic ways, such as assuming that the cats represent Jewish gangsters. Antisemitism pervades academia in Gaza, and no one can oppose that without facing real world consequences.

That is only the tip of the iceberg. West Bank universities compete as to which of them have had students kill the most Jews. Universities are the ideological homes of terrorism, and often the physical homes as well –weapons labs have been built in Gaza universities and one of them held kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a time. Many terrorists during the second intifada came from West Bank universities, including Ahlam Tamimi who helped bomb the Sbarro pizza shop.

The universities also often praise terrorism. The most infamous case was the exhibit, complete with bloody body parts, of the same Sbarro attack at An Najah University: The same university more recently displayed mock-ups of a man stabbing a religious Jew and a bloody model of a car running over Jews.

Nelson does point out times that Israel interfered with campus curricula, but that all ended at the end of the first intifada. Palestinian government control and intimidation continues on campus today, to the point that students and professors are self-censoring to stay out of trouble. (He does talk about Israel’s relatively rare raids on campus since then, which are understandable when there is an imminent terror threat but often could be more effective by detaining students at home.)

Nelson also shows how other claims by BDS, that Israel blocks students from going abroad or foreign instructors to come to teach, are exaggerated – Israel does not have any more strict restrictions on those movements than most Western democracies.

Small details in the book are illuminating. For example, Nelson points out that while Israel is roundly castigated for administrative detention, the Palestinian Authority detains hundreds of people without charge as well, although they are not as forthcoming with the statistics as Israel is. (I follow Palestinian media closely and have never seen any mention of this.)

Another section has a footnote that mentions that Norman Finkelstein actually defended Hamas’ policy of murdering “collaborators” with Israel.

This is the sort of hypocrisy exposed in Not in Kansas Anymore. The boycotters’ pretense of caring about Palestinian academic freedom is clearly just an excuse to attack Israel as they ignore the far worse crimes that Palestinian students and professors are subject to every day from their own leaders and peers.

Kalman Samuels on Shalva, Yossi, and “Dreams never Dreamed” (Judean Rose)

"Dreams never Dreamed" offers an inside look at how a child’s devastating injury from a tainted vaccine, led to the founding of Shalva, the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities and home of the famous Shalva Band. As author Kalman Samuels, founder and CEO of Shalva would have it, Shalva’s accomplishments are all due to his wife Malki’s vision. Malki Samuels has a keen sense of what needs to be done, and how it should be accomplished.

Like many young people of the 70s, Kalman, a Canadian national, grew up in a secular Jewish home, and ended up religiously observant in Israel. It’s always interesting to read how people get from point A to point B in their personal journeys, but that’s not the reason to buy this book. You want to read “Dreams never Dreamed” to learn how people turn tragedy into hope and hope into tremendous accomplishments, as Kalman and Malki Samuels have done. You want to know how people keep dreaming dreams and beyond when life throws a curve ball. How you get up the next day and make things happen.

There are other reasons to read “Dreams never Dreamed.” You’ll want to know more about Yossi Samuels, his life today, and how the Shalva Band made a splash on the national stage. I spoke to Kalman (full disclosure, we have a family connection) to find out more about the book and his story:

Varda Epstein: Tell us about the name of your book: “Dreams never Dreamed.” What are some of the dreams you never dreamed that came about? To what do you attribute these successes?

Kalman Samuels: The name of my book reflects the nature of the miraculous series of events that led to my son Yossi's breakthrough and the establishment of the Shalva organization, which serves thousands of children with disabilities and their families. These were not my childhood dreams or particular goals that I set out to achieve from a young age. They are dreams that I could have never imagined, and as such they are dreams which I never dreamed.

One of the dreams that I never dreamed would come about is Yossi's remarkable breakthrough to communication. It changed all of our lives forever. Yossi became blind and deaf during infancy, and after eight long years of silence and darkness, he learned to spell sign language in the palm of his hand. Yossi was able to communicate with us and learn about the world. Everyone in the family learned how to speak sign language and we helped Yossi learn new words. He was like a sponge and he soaked up the whole world around him instantly. We could have never imagined this miraculous turnaround.

You can't hold a good man down. Yossi Samuels, at work.

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us a bit about your family roots? Your wife’s?

Kalman Samuels: I was born in Vancouver, Canada to a very loving and supportive family. Although not religiously practicing Jews, my parents were very proud of their Jewish roots and celebrated Jewish holidays. My siblings and I grew up with all of the luxuries of a middle-class, North American lifestyle.

Malki's family came from Europe and survived the Holocaust. Malki grew up with a pure faith in G-d and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, went to good schools, and enjoyed belonging to a growing community.

Kalman Samuels' high school graduation photo, back when he was "Kerry."

Varda Epstein: Your book is very interesting in that it’s a first person account, but your wife is a central figure in your story. You take her guidance, and somehow it always works out, better than you had expected. Malki seems to be equal parts intuition and wisdom. How does she know what she knows? How did you come to trust her? Can you give us an example of a counterintuitive directive from Malki that followed this successful formula?

Kalman Samuels: Malki always had a very profound understanding of the human spirit. Whether it was something related to Yossi, our family's general wellbeing, or Shalva's growth, I always trusted Malki every step of the way—and I still always do.

Malki insisted on Yossi wearing glasses, even though he was confirmed blind. She explained that they were the one thing he didn't take apart and that he insisted on having his glasses with him at all times. It must mean that the glasses are helpful to him in some way—and they were.

Also when it came to things beyond Malki's motherly instincts—like navigating my job in computer programming, or the architecture of the Shalva center—Malki's direction was always spot on. Successful counterintuitive directives from Malki is definitely a theme of our story and the inspiration behind how our lives and Shalva have progressed and developed over the years.

A young Yossi Samuels, learning about the world.

Varda Epstein: Yossi was the victim of a tainted vaccination. How do you see him today? How do you see the issue of vaccination? What about the Israeli legal system? Is it possible to get justice?

Kalman Samuels: Yossi is not the victim of a vaccination; rather, he is a victim of medical malpractice in that they knew they had a tainted batch of vaccine and continued using it for six months injuring hundreds including Yossi. Unfortunately, there are many people around the world who are victims of this sort and I believe that many can relate to the helplessness that may transpire as a result of lacking transparency within large, bureaucratic systems.

Yossi Samuels was a beautiful healthy baby. Until he received a tainted vaccine.

Varda Epstein: How many families have you helped as a result of the organization you and Malki founded, Shalva?

Kalman Samuels: Every day, about 1,000 individuals with disabilities walk throughout our doors, and when including our additional programs that take place on a weekly or period-specific basis there are over 2,000. Their families also participate in support groups, events, and programs; and as such, our Shalva family is very large. Going back thirty years, I know that tens of thousands of families have been helped by the Shalva organization.

Kalman Samuels with son Yossi Samuels

Varda Epstein: Can you give us an overview of Shalva’s services and programs?

Kalman Samuels: Shalva provides a range of services to guide children with disabilities and their families throughout the lifecycle, from infancy through to adulthood. From a mere few weeks post birth, Shalva has personal early intervention therapy sessions for infants and their parents. We also have a day care and preschool for toddlers and an after school program for children in grade school. They come to Shalva for an afternoon full of activities- swimming, music, art, baking, and more. We also have a respite program that allows children to sleep over at Shalva once a week. We have summer camps and sports teams for our children as well. In recent years, Shalva branched out into adult services as well. Today we also provide programs for vocational training, employment, military service, and independent living in the community.

Rabbi Kalman Samuels, today.

Varda Epstein: The thing about Shalva is that it’s stunning. Why is this important?

Kalman Samuels: Many people who come to Shalva are taken by the colorful and welcoming interior design. Coupled with high standards of cleanliness, these physical elements of the building embody Shalva's emphasis on human dignity. Our children and parents feel welcome here and enjoy spending time here with their families and friends. It sends a message that people with disabilities are no less deserving of respect and high standards of quality than anyone else in society.

The Shalva Center is stunning, and situated in the heart of Jerusalem.

Varda Epstein: Everyone is in love with the Shalva band. How did they end up getting the gig to play for the president?

Kalman Samuels: The Shalva Band was invited to perform at the IAC Summit in 2019 and were notified just minutes before the performance that they would be introduced to the stage by United States President Trump. They performed a very moving rendition of "God Bless America" which was concluded by a surprising group hug with the President. Their performance made the front page of the newspapers in Israel and was tweeted by both President Trump and the White House. It was a very special moment for the band and the President.

Varda Epstein: What skills does it take to open a nonprofit like Shalva? Would you have jumped in if you had realized the extent of the undertaking?

Kalman Samuels: It takes a great deal of organizational, management, and fundraising skills to run an organization on Shalva's scale. We have thousands of beneficiaries, hundreds of employees and volunteers, and a 220,000 sq. meter building that runs around the clock. What I jumped into in 1990 was far from this. We had six children in a local garden apartment—and even then, we were overwhelmed. We could have never imagined that Shalva would become the organization that it is today and we feel blessed to be able to facilitate all of our programs to help so many children and families.

The very famous Shalva Band, which bears witness to the fact that dreams can be realized, even with disabilities.

Varda Epstein: Can you give us an update on Yossi’s life, today?

Kalman Samuels: Today Yossi is just as full of dreams and aspirations as ever. His daily routine is comprised of gainful employment at Israel’s Highway Six, which he finds personally meaningful. In recent years, Yossi has also channeled his keen sense of smell and taste to become certified as a sommelier and to produce two of his own wines. Outside of work, Yossi enjoys exercising and riding horses and his life is rich with family and friends.

Yossi Samuels meets President Bush in 2006.

"Dreams never Dreamed" is currently available on Amazon, Kindle, and the Koren website (https://korenpub.co.il/products/dreams-never-dreamed).

***

· Read more Judean Rose interviews:

· Arnold Roth: Ahlam Tamimi is Not in Hiding. Why is She Free?

· Shai Glick and Btsalmo: Unmasking the Disguise and Fighting for the Real Human Rights

· Betina Thorball to BDS: Herbalists Have a Right to Professional Neutrality

· David Collier’s Report on Amnesty International Reveals Its Toxicity and Hate

· Richard Landes: The Man Who Gave Pallywood a Name

· Genie Milgrom: “I Could Just Feel my Grandmothers Through the Papers”

· Phyllis Chesler: The Radical Feminist Who Refuses Your Intersectional Anti-Israel Slot

· Otzma Yehudit’s Dr Adva Biton: Finding Strength to Fight for Others

· Ryan Bellerose: Indigenous Has Nothing to Do with Time and Everything to Do with Connection

· Akiva Fuld: “I’m Doing This For Me”

· A Father Speaks Out: The Murder of Malki Roth and the Refusal of Jordan to Extradite the Beast Ahlam Tamimi (Arnold Roth)

· Israel's Jewish Indigenous Land Rights: A Conversation with Nan Greer, Part 1

· Israel's Jewish Indigenous Land Rights: A Conversation with Nan Greer, Part 2

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Book Review: Rise and Kill First, by Ronen Bergman

Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First is an astonishing work of research. Through over a thousand interviews, Bergman managed to write a history of Israel's policy of targeted assassinations that bypassed the famous secretiveness of Israel's spy agencies as well as the Israeli censor. (The book itself is proof that the Israeli military censor is very reluctant to actually censor things.)

The nearly 700 page book is not merely a history of targeted killings by Israel but really a history of Israel's legendary spy agencies, the Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet. While the story concentrates on assassinations, and is as complete on that topic as one can imagine, nothing happens in a vacuum - killings are done for a reason, whether it is to discourage future terrorism or to send a message to past terrorists that they will never be safe. (The hunt for the Munich terrorists is an example.)

The agencies' growing pains are documented as Israel learns how to do spycraft. From the early pre-state days through the covert (and sometimes overt) war against the terrorists who intruded into Israel in the 1950s, Israel's spy agencies grew in capabilities. They had to pivot to new methods and tools as the enemies and tactics changed.

The action never stops. Bergman writes that his original manuscript was twice as long; he managed to shorten each episode to a couple of pages without the stories losing their punch.

This drama is not only in the successes but also the failures - and there were a lot of failures, with the inevitable political fallout from the government. The Mossad and Shin Bet are not infallible by a long shot, and there have been botched operations, as well as seemingly unnecessary assassinations.

Especially striking at this time of a worldwide pandemic is that decisions are often made with incomplete information. Acting based on assumptions backed by facts is necessary and moral. The alternative, of doing nothing, can endanger more lives than the action can. Sometimes, the assassinations can help avoid war. These are difficult moral arguments and Bergman objectively looks at both sides.

Some of the mistakes were extraordinarily embarrassing. The botched attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal's life was a major setback. The assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was successful but was a diplomatic disaster as the agents used international passports. Yet when mistakes were made, the security services improved their methods and procedures to ensure that every mistake is made exactly once.

Bergman's reporting goes well into the 21st century, with details on the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. He also details the assassinations of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyeh and of Syrian general Muhammad Suleiman in 2008, both of whom worked closely with Iran and the with the more recently departed Qassam Soleimani.

My only quibble is that Bergman sometimes allows his personal opinions to override the facts. He blames the second intifada on Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount even as he knows the evidence that it was pre-planned and Sharon's visit was only an excuse. His antipathy towards Netanyahu also allows one-sided reporting, with the other side of the story buried in footnotes.

But those are minor problems. Rise and Kill First was praised by both pro- and anti-Israel critics because he does such a good job of showing the ambiguity of the policies and of working in the shadows, breaking the normal rules of war, to help save lives.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Book review: The Jonathan Sacks Haggada Collected Essays

This year, in response to the pandemic, Koren Publishers offered a free download of their Haggadah with the commentary of the former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks.

But they didn't offer the other half of the book, the one that opens from the left-to-right side. I didn't even realize that this haggada had such an extensive set of essays - nearly 190 pages, which is pretty much book-length itself.

I love Sacks' writings and his weekly divrei Torah. He has an astonishing ability to notice things that others have not. His essays on Passover truly shine.

Sack's fluency with a wide range of sources, whether they be ancient or modern, history or poetry, sacred or ordinary, allows him to come up with startling conclusions that strike you with the dual realizations that no one ever seems to have made these points before, and that they seem to be correct. Here is an enthusiastic celebration of the Torah and specifically the Exodus as not only a story but as a work of philosophy, history and morality that pre-dates all others, and that was far ahead of its time and that had unparalleled influence in modern Western civilization.

Just one stunning example. Up until after World War II, the concept that one is obligated to adhere to higher standards, and to disobey if necessary, ones own leaders was hardly considered mainstream. Only after the Holocaust was the defense of "just following orders" no longer considered valid. Everyone is expected to disobey commands, even at the risk of one's life, that violate the higher values of human rights - but that is a relatively new concept.

Or is it? More than three thousand years ago, two women named Shifra and Puah - who according to the literal text seem to have been Egyptian, not Jewish - refused to obey Pharaoh's direct orders to murder all Jewish males upon birth. To them, there was a moral imperative that outweighed the demands of a deity-king.

This was, Rabbi Sacks notes, the first known example of civil disobedience, and one that was thousands of years ahead of modern times and completely alien to all peoples before (Sacks argues that the example in the Greek tragedy of Antigone is in fact not based on a higher moral code but on family loyalty.)

That insight alone would be enough to make a book notable, but these essays are filled with them. Sacks' essay on antisemitism is as good a treatment of the topic as any and better than most. He shows how the Exodus story influenced the founding fathers of the US to build a completely new type of nation, based on a Biblical-style covenant and concepts of inalienable rights that were most definitely not self-evident in 1776, but that were first written in the Torah.

Other essays and insights are equally dazzling, from noticing that the first speech Moses gives to the people on the cusp of freedom is an exhortation to teach their children, to brilliantly pinpointing the exact timeframe of the rabbis' seder in Bnei Brak and the importance of the anecdote to Jewish history.

You do not have to wait until next Pesach to enjoy the insights from Rabbi Sacks.

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