Radomer Yom Hashoah Gathering April 24, 2023 (Catching up #17)

Thanksgiving Day yesterday, Native American Heritage Day today and after enjoying a Thanksgiving meal with family and friends I'm thinking about the ongoing crisis for Jews everywhere and the conflict in Israel, Gaza and Palestine. And yes, the crisis for Jews everywhere weighs on me. As anyone paying attention to what I've written and posted over the years, I am the child of survivors of the Holocaust, the grandchild and nephew of many family members who I never knew because they were murdered in the Holocaust, and I emphasize murdered because that was what happened to them, as well as a member of a community of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as well as the few who survived that are still with us more than 78 years after the end of WWII. 

This is not a history of antisemitism, it is some of my thoughts on where we are now and where we've been. This is my blog, my space to say something, my bully pulpit. 

Antisemitism is a recurring human disease that refuses to die away and probably will not even were there no Jews for the antisemites to revile. In Poland in the 1960s and 1970s after all but a very small handful of elderly Jews were forced out by the Communist, Soviet supported government, they still held antisemitic campaigns, reviling the Jews who weren't there for their country's economic ills. I guess after the uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 they were not so stupid as to blame the Soviet Union and the Communist system for their problems.

In the Middle East, in Syria, Iran and Iraq where substantial Jewish communities existed for two millennia and more, after the establishment of the State of Israel there were pogroms and every Jew living there was forced into exile. To show I'm not unbalanced, I recognize that Palestinians and their allies won't let us forget that many of them left their homes during and after the Arab League's war to crush the new state, some forced out, most leaving voluntarily but those same Palestinians and their allies don't want us to remember what happened to the Jews and their communities in their states.

It's curious that Jew hatred occurs at all levels of society. The ruling groups use it to motivate people in lower social levels, the hoi polloi act out of sense of resentment, that these people are pushing them down, taking something from them, despite this being demonstrably false. The blood libel laid on the Jews has  deep historical sources and though obviously false to anyone who knows anything about the Jewish revulsion to consuming anything with blood, has lasted in one form or another for more than a millennium. The counterfeit "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a product of the Russian Tsarist secret police continues to find currency in contemporary antisemitism. The contradictory belief that there is a conspiracy of both global capitalists controlled by Jewish bankers and Jewish communists and socialists working to overthrow capitalism would be laughable if it wasn't taken seriously by antisemites who refuse to recognize the obvious dissonance in this belief.

Recognizing the usefulness of antisemitism in motivating resentment and action against Jews by people who don't understand or see where there own lower economic status comes from is a stimulus to both the right and the left to use Jews as convenient scapegoats. Against these deeply held beliefs that are comforting to the holder of these beliefs, finding an outsider to blame for the systemic biases that hold them in place doesn't help us resolve the problem of antisemitism. What we can do is stay alert and take defensive actions against antisemitism as well as irrational bias against other peoples.

Keep in mind, it is Jews and Israel being attacked for the crisis in the Middle East but why aren't these attackers also standing up against genocide in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen and China among others?

Just my opinion.

Anyway, in catching up here's a bunch of photos I took in April, exactly six months ago at the Chabad Center of Northeast Queens where the Radomer Mutual Culture Center gathered for our annual Holocaust memorial service and luncheon. It is a good thing that more than 70 years after the survivors of one of the fiercest antisemitic, institutionalized violence against Jews founded the society as a way to show we are stronger than those who would destroy us and are still standing and ready to fight.

Forgive me for posting this many pictures.

Permalink

Boring Milkweed Pictures - sort of still (catching up #16)

 It's fall, almost Thanksgiving and the afternoon light, when the sun's out and half-way between noon and sunset is beautiful. I might say, if I was in the mood for cliché, breathtaking. Except I'm not out of breath except for pushing through the raspberry canes to get a decent shot of the milkweed seeds and coma (floss). We've got several plants at the edge of our property and just beyond that still have a couple of pods with seeds and coma still attached. In case you don't know, they are part of the life cycle of the eastern North American Monarch Butterfly - they lay their eggs on it and their caterpillars eat the leaves. 

The milkweed in fall is stark - most of the leaves are gone, the seed pods with their seeds emerged surrounded by their coma stand out, a miniature tableau of graceful nature, waiting for a strong wind to lift the seeds and it's little glider off to colonize another spot in the open woods and fields around where I live.

Speaking of the woods and fields, there are a couple of photos of them in the autumn light.

I think during the shortest days of winter I'll look at these and remember how much I like the autumn in New York.

I'm not a very good nature photographer but once in a while, I find a little bit of inspiration in something like this. I also like the look of the woods around the house at this time of year - the leaves mostly off the trees, the sun casting a glow on last of them in the understory. So I shoot a few photos and present them to you. If you are bored by them, well, so it goes.

Permalink

Things I see and an opinion - Still (catching up #15)

 As I struggle to catch up I scroll through photos I've taken over the past several years - I'll leave you to decide how many a several is and I see photos of things that caught my eye and in my mind needed to be recorded.

The pity of it is that none of these things are ugly enough to match the ugliness that comes out of the mouth of the former president whose plans if elected are to turn this country into a one-party state. He begins to sound more like a raving, rabid version of Mussolini or Hitler when he spews about the greatest danger in the USA is the left, which if you are a liberal or even a thinking person's conservative you know there is almost no left left in the USA, that he will crush his opposition, I think he used the word "vermin," and though he hasn't said it directly, make plans to stay in office until he dies. He would've done that 3 years ago if he could and the look on his face when he boarded his private jet bound for Palm Beach spoke volumes.

He is no longer sane and we need to get an order of protection against him. If the Republican Party nominates him for president as it seems bound to do, fighting hard to keep him from winning, and he can whine all he wants about stolen elections - it's the thief who thinks he's been ripped off because he got caught - that's his problem. Let's not make it America's.

Ah, but I rant a little tonight. Just because I get a little angry every time I see his ugly puss and fat carcass on the news doesn't mean I have to dump it on you.

So enjoy the photos and leave me to my opinions. If you disagree don't get angry. Opinions are something we can differ on and remain civil. 

Seriously? How far you going to get with that boot on your tire?

Resist!

I hope the litterer who left this caught their train.

Read the graffito - gender confusion? or jsut can't spell?

Somebody was trying to say something but I don't know what.

Don't eat anything off the sidewalk.

Why? Why not.

I hope the interview went well

Something vaguely phallic - or perhaps three balloons are just balloons.

What the heck?

Permalink

Spring 2023 - We lost Eisenberg's and gained S & P Café (still catching up #14)

I liked Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop on 5th Ave. in NYC, across from the Flatiron Building. It was an old school luncheonette, unpretentious, economical and more popular than it's good but not great food would lead one to expect.

It was March 2021 and Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, a Madison Square mainstay since 1929 shut down. The luncheonette was bought by its fifth owner, Warren Chiu in 2018. He promised “to keep Eisenberg’s the way it has been,” but could not. Revenues were down and the pandemic was slaughtering businesses in NYC. The restaurant that had been "raising New York City's cholesterol since 1929" was gone. It was a sad day for people such as myself who regularly enjoyed meeting friends for lunch or an early supper at Eisenberg's. It wasn't the best sandwich in NYC but it was reliably good and the atmosphere, harkening back to a day when lunch counters were common and people ate shoulder to shoulder was worthwhile and worthy of preservation.

A year later, the proprietors of Brooklyn's Court Street Grocer's took over the location, cleaned it up, restoring it to its former glory and reopened as S&P Café, a clone of Eisenberg's with a name snatched from the past. Warren Chiu seems to own the rights to the name Eisenberg's and rather than yield it to a worthy successor, unapologetically kept the website, with "nyc.com" as part of its address and has opened a pop-up in San Francisco. Since they couldn't call it Eisenberg's they took the name of the eatery that was in the same location before the Eisenberger brothers opened their place. Yet outside, above the plate glass windows the old Eisenberg's sign remains.

The popularity of the new place is reassuring. The menu is almost the same as the old, with prices adjusted for changing times. The sandwiches seemed a bit better, the meat a little jucier, the rye bread terrific. The furniture and many of the employees are the same though the old cash register at the end of the counter's been replaced by a modern electronic tablet.

The first two photos were taken in 2018. The interior black and white shot shows the place just before closing on a weeknight, so it's no surprise it's quite.

The next three were taken as the interregnum was ending. The outside looks the same but there was a new sign being painted on the glass by the person in the next photo followed by a shot of what the interior looked like when it was being restored.

The last batch were taken during two visits. That woman sure is enjoying her potato pancake!

Permalink