12/14 Links Pt2: 50 years ago, a failed hijacking brought light into the world; Omar, Tlaib, Sarsour to headline Georgia Senate event as Warnock fights anti-Semitism claims

From Ian:

50 years ago, a failed hijacking brought light into the world

A little less than 50 years ago, my mother, Natalia Stieglitz, walked down a flight of stairs in search of secret knowledge.

A few months earlier, on December 15th, 1970, a Soviet court convened in Leningrad to try a group of young Jews (and some allies) who planned (and failed) to hijack a small airplane and fly across the border. After years of learning Judaism and Hebrew in secret, after applying repeatedly for emigration visas to Israel and receiving one ‘refusal’ after another, the members of this group had decided to take matters into their own hands. They did not expect to succeed, not really (the letter they left behind was titled “Our Will”). But they had hoped to make a statement.

And they did.

Suddenly, people around the world were asking themselves why a group of promising, normative, young people would try to do something so very outlandish. Were the USSR’s assurances that they allowed Jews to emigrate actually true? Worse, from the Soviets’ perspective: people across the USSR itself were wondering the same thing.

The Six-Day War in 1967 awakened many Soviet Jews to their Jewish identity and filled them with longing to learn about the Jewish state. But most of them didn’t know what to do with what the authorities were bound to see as seditious feelings, nor that there was a movement of people like them that could support them and lend them strength. The Leningrad Trials changed all that: in their efforts to unearth and condemn the so-called-crimes of the would-be hijackers, the authorities publicized the existence of the Jewish underground that had long worked in Leningrad, Riga and Kishinev. Young Jews around the USSR had found out that hundreds of Jews just like themselves had spent years learning Hebrew, reclaiming their tradition, and seeking ways to move to Israel. Defying the USSR was no longer just a dream.

In the course of the trial, Sylva Zalmanson, the only woman to be tried, gave voice to this defiance. Her speech, copied and passed from hand to hand in secret, inspired people wherever it arrived. It did no less when it reached my mother all the way in Moscow, filling her with admiration and with awe.

But my mother could not understand the last sentence in the speech. It was written in a foreign alphabet, which at first she thought might be Sanskrit. After learning that it was actually Hebrew, and making discreet inquiries among her friends, she was on her way to meet a stranger who could decipher those mysterious words.

Europe can’t fight anti-Semitism while ignoring threats to Israel

Dear European Union, we have to talk about a major foreign policy blind spot: your relations with Israel.

Countless times, I have heard European leaders, on commemorative anniversaries and at memorial sites, express their anguish over the Holocaust, the extermination of 6 million European Jews and the fertile European soil that nurtured anti-Semitism over centuries. I have heard them vow repeatedly, “never again.”

I don’t for a moment minimize these statements and gestures. To the contrary, they are extremely important, all the more so as anti-Semitism is again on the rise in Europe and knowledge of the Holocaust declines.

But — and it’s a big but — too many European leaders are not connecting this painful past to present policies.

I was particularly struck by this when I was invited, in 2013, to be one of six keynote speakers at a ceremony at Mauthausen, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Austria, where my cousin, Mila Racine, was killed in the last weeks of the war.

The four speakers who preceded me — the presidents of Austria, Hungary and Poland, and the speaker of the Russian parliament — all invoked painful images of the war and the massive loss of Jewish life. They made moving statements affirming their commitment to remembrance and their opposition to any resurgence of hatred against Jews.

Yet not one mentioned the word “Israel.” Not one connected the tragedy of the Holocaust to the absence of an Israel that, had it existed, might have rescued and offered safety to countless European Jews trapped on the Continent.

And not one noted that nearly half of the world’s Jews today live in Israel, which faces both military threats to its existence and endless challenges to its legitimacy.

How can any leader speak about the lessons of the Holocaust and the menace of modern-day anti-Semitism without reference to the ongoing threats against Israel and the Jewish right to self-determination?

What happened that day at Mauthausen was not unusual. Indeed, it was all too routine.

Misguided American Jews hiding in plain sight

American Progressive Jews remind me of black people who were thrilled if they could pass for white. I understand that desire. Black people were not welcome in the white world. To get ahead, to get anywhere, it was easier if one could “pass.”

It appears to me that too many Jews in America, today, feel the need to “pass,” to hide in plain sight, in order to be accepted in the Progressive New World. Perhaps because they are too comfortable in America, in Galut (exile), and do not want to move to Israel to be safe, so they cozy up to Jew haters, to blend in.

There was another time when Jews hid in plain sight. They too were comfortable, well-off, educated, sophisticated: Progressive. They were not at all like the other Jews; you know, the one’s from the shtetl. Interesting bit of history. In the end Hitler did not care because all over the world, from time immemorial, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. This same attitude of us and them is happening in America. Liberal, Progressive Reform Jews hardly reacted when New York Governor Cuomo scapegoated Orthodox Jews, those Jews, for spreading Covid, although he said nothing about BLM protests or Shia Muslim gatherings for Ashura.

What is it, dear misguided, Progressive Jews, that frightens you about being Jewish in America that you align yourselves with the “other” Progressive groups who attack Jews and Israel? I watch as you bend the knee to the antisemitic gods of diversity, Black Lives Matter, and critical race theory.

It never goes well for Am Yisrael when Jews, trying to “pass” stand with those who attack us.

What we are witnessing now is far from the first time that Jews in America tried to diminish the assault on Am Yisrael-the Jewish people, in order to feel comfortable in America.
-In 1918, liberated Jews in America said there was no need for the Balfour Declaration, calling for the formation of a Jewish state in Israel. Why bother.

On July 4, 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the national organization of Reform rabbis shared a resolution arguing against the Declaration’s premise that the Jews were a people without a country, when in fact they were “and of right ought to be at home in all lands.”

And then came the Nazis. What a way to learn a lesson.
-During WWII when FDR was asked, well begged, to take in the Jews from the St. Louis, fleeing the gas chambers, this at-the-time beloved Democrat President said, no.

It was Reform Rabbi Steven Wise, the founder of the Jewish Institute of Religion to train rabbis in Reform Judaism which later merged into the Hebrew Union College, who during WWII decided to pass on pushing FDR to take in Jews. In 2008 David Ellenson was one in a list of prominent American Jewish leaders who censured the Jewish leadership of the 1940s. He wrote:

“In the 1930s, it was Wise who led the rallies against Hitler, so why did he fail so horribly in the 1940s? Part of the explanation lies in Wise’s “absolute and complete love” for president Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as his antipathy toward the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and toward the Bergson Group, whose leaders were followers of Jabotinsky, something that “helped blind him” to the need for more activism.

This is America: Anti-Semitism is not a punchline

A growing ignorance

Sixty-three percent of millennials and Gen Zers don't know that 6 million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust, according to a September survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Almost half could not name one concentration camp. In New York, where I live, almost 20% of millennials and Gen Zers incorrectly believe that Jews caused the Holocaust.

It's a problem: Fifteen states require Holocaust education as part of secondary school, yet last year in Florida (one of the required states), a principal refused to call the Holocaust "a factual, historical event."

In 2018, there were 1,879 recorded attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions, according to the Anti-Defamation League. That's the third-highest year on record since the 1970s, when they started keeping records of such attacks.

And the shootings:
The Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting in 2018 killed 11 and wounded six.
Last year, a gunman opened fire at a synagogue near San Diego during Passover services, killing one and wounding three.
In Germany also last year, a "heavily armed" gunman live-streamed anti-Semitic taunts as he tried to force himself into a synagogue on Yom Kippur. He then killed two people at random outside.
Last month, four people died (including the assailant) and 15 people were wounded in a shooting in the heart of Vienna, Austria, near the city's main synagogue. It's unclear whether the attack was targeting the place of worship.


On Tuesday, the only Anne Frank memorial in the U.S. was vandalized. Swastikas and the words, "We are everywhere," were found affixed to the statue.

Synagogues in my hometown of Rockville, Maryland, now have large concrete barriers at their entrances and enhanced police protection.

Who's laughing?

China's tiny Jewish community in fear as Beijing erases its history

For this year’s Hanukkah, Amir is lighting menorah candles and reciting blessings to celebrate the holiday’s eight nights, as many Jews are around the world.

But he does so in secret, worried that Chinese officials will come around – as they often do on religious occasions – to enforce a ban against Judaism, pressuring him to renounce his faith. Sometimes, he’s even called in for interrogations.

“Every time we celebrate, we are scared,” said Amir, not his real name as he asked not to be identified over worries of retaliation. "Whatever we do, we’re always very careful to make sure the authorities don’t find out.”

Since 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has waged a harsh campaign against foreign influence and unapproved religion, part of a push to ‘Sinicise’ faith – ripping down church crosses and mosque onion domes, and detaining more than a million Muslims in the western Xinjiang region.

As well as Christians and Muslims, Mr Xi’s suppression has hit China’s tiny congregation of Jews, whose ancestors settled more than a millennium ago along the Yellow River in Kaifeng, then the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty.

That such a small group can attract the Communist Party’s ire shows how far the crackdown has spread. Only about 1,000 people in Kaifeng claim Jewish heritage, and of those, only around 100 or are practising Jews, experts say – barely a splash in China’s sea of 1.4 billion. Even at its peak in the 1500s, the community only numbered around 5,000.

“It’s government policy – China doesn’t want to recognise us as Jews,” one man, who dreams of training as a rabbi in Israel, told the Telegraph. “Their goal is to make sure the next generation doesn’t have any Jewish identity.” (h/t billposer)

Omar, Tlaib, Sarsour to headline Georgia Senate event as Warnock fights anti-Semitism claims

Democrat Raphael Warnock was already struggling to beat back allegations of anti-Semitism, and then Linda Sarsour and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib jumped into the Georgia Senate election picture.

The Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] plans to hold Sunday evening a virtual “vote-a-thon” aimed at encouraging Georgia Muslims to vote in the Jan. 5 run-off elections, an event featuring the Democratic congresswomen as well as Ms. Sarsour.

All three have expressed support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment cause, and all three have been embroiled in recent years in headline-grabbing anti-Semitism controversies. All three deny being anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.

The campaign of Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who faces Mr. Warnock in the run-off, issued a statement Saturday accusing CAIR of “amplifying the voices of notorious anti-Semites such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – both of whom are participating in CAIR’s campaign event tomorrow night for Warnock.”

“It’s no surprise to see such a radical fringe group support Raphael Warnock,” said the Loeffler campaign. “On Israel, CAIR and Warnock’s beliefs align perfectly. Warnock has been repeatedly exposed for his anti-Israel positions.”

Corbyn and Catharsis: Tracing A Political Tragedy

Some of Corbyn’s critics consider him to be a total non-entity, but even if he did not re-mould British politics quite how he had hoped, we should not be so quick to consign him to historical irrelevance [2]. Jeremy Corbyn will be remembered: not in spite of the fact that he was an abject failure, but because of it. Songs will be sung of him, plays written and performed, and the tale of his rise and fall will – like, say, Thomas Cromwell’s – forever be enticing. Corbyn is the ultimate tragic hero of our times.

Do not let the ‘hero’ part of that phrase lead you astray. That I describe Corbyn as a tragic hero does not mean that I am fond of him, any more than I’m fond of Othello when he kills Desdemona, Anakin Skywalker when he butchers the younglings, or Oedipus when he does what he’s best known for. Instead, I mean to say that the political trajectory of Corbyn ticks all the boxes of Aristotelian tragedy perfectly.

The ‘distinctive mark of tragic imitation’, says Aristotle in his Poetics, is that it should ‘excite pity and fear’. Corbyn certainly ‘excited’ fear in Britain’s Jews, 47 per cent of whom said that they would ‘seriously consider’ emigrating if he became prime minister [3]. His supporters likewise argue that he evokes fear in the super-rich, the 1%, the ‘few’. As for ‘pity’, his current predicament is piteous in the extreme. Exactly one year ago he was campaigning for the keys to Downing Street. But dreams of real political power have long since vanished, and for the time being, he would settle just to have the whip restored.

Corbyn is ‘a man who is not eminently good and just – yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty’. The tragedy of Corbyn commences when he is ‘renowned and prosperous’: the leader of the Labour Party, positioning himself, particularly after surprising the nation by making modest gains in the election of 2017, as a prime minister in waiting. The ‘frailty’ – the hamartia – that brings about his downfall is, as for so many tragic heroes, his hubris. He could not straightforwardly apologise for the antisemitism that festered in his party while he was in charge. His hubris blinded him to the possibility that the EHRC’s investigation was fair and legitimate. Instead, he characterised the claims of antisemitism as ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media’ [4]. He could conceive of it only as a sinister conspiracy, designed by his enemies in conjunction with the right-wing press.

Former UK Labour leader Corbyn launches new ‘Peace and Justice’ movement

The former leader of Britain’s main opposition Labour party announced Sunday that he is launching a new human rights organization to boost social justice and peace in Britain and around the world.

“The aim of the Peace and Justice Project will be to bring people together, for social justice, peace and human rights, in Britain and across the world,” Jeremy Corbyn said in a video posted to his Twitter feed.

“It’s there to create space, hope and opportunity for those campaigning for social justice and a future that works for the many, not the few,” he said.

Corbyn sits in the House of Commons as an independent MP after he was ousted from Labour’s parliamentary membership following the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report into anti-Semitism in the party, and his response to the report, although he is challenging his removal.

“We will work with unions and social movements to build a network of campaigners, grassroots activists, thinkers and leaders, to share experiences and generate ideas about solutions to our common problems,” Corbyn said.

“This year, many of us have felt powerless in the face of forces beyond our control. It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said. “Things can, and they will, change.”

Another #antisemite enters the "social justice, peace and human rights" NGO industry. @jeremycorbyn following in the steps of @georgegalloway and many others https://t.co/q1kDXlXxM3

— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) December 13, 2020

Web Pranksters Target Corbyn's New 'Peace & Justice Project'

Finally deciding on what to do during retirement, Jeremy Corbyn launched his new movement yesterday afternoon, “The Project for Peace and Justice”, promising British politics little more than a glorified student union activist forum for adults. Unsurprisingly for a geriatric who relies on his wife to run his Twitter account, Corbyn didn’t think through the tech side of his new operation, registering the URL as the typically modest, “TheCorbynProject.com”. Failing to also buy the more obvious “ProjectforPeaceandJustice.com” address…

Naturally pranksters have wasted no time in buying the address up, greeting users with a new and improved mission statement:
“Bringing folk together for social and economic justice peace and human rights in UK and around the world but not Israel”

Mistaken Jezza loyalists are also told to “get in touch for more information! We aren’t a cult honest” and that the project was founded after:
“Seeing a need for energetic, non-profit work in this area, we formed our organization after some of us rightly got booted out of Labour! and the commute to Hamas HQ wasn’t covered by expenses.”

Anti IHRA Academic Supporting Qassams on Tel Aviv

Academic Sai Englert recently wrote an article for Middle East Eye entitled “With this flawed antisemitism definition, Britain is closing down academic freedom”. It’s an unimaginative piece arguing against the IHRA definition on the basis that the “definition is attempting to silence international criticism” of Israel.

Englert, who is a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, is concerned; “the British state is happy to throw Jewish communities under the bus” he writes.

We are glad to see that Englert is so concerned with the wellbeing of Jewish communities.

It was therefore somewhat of a surprise (not really) when we stumbled across this little-known video of Englert chanting in support of Hamas rockets striking Tel Aviv. That’s right, the man so concerned with Jewish wellbeing is more than happy to lead a mob singing in support of rockets fired by a homophobic, antisemitic terrorist group whose stated aims are to ethnically cleanse Jews.

The gulf between left wing hate & reality.

Yesterday - Kerry Ann Mendoza - took Israel's absorbtion centres - which have been part of the most successful refugee absortion programs in the world - and compared them to concentration camps.

This is INSANE https://t.co/F7sQozoggD

— David Collier (@mishtal) December 13, 2020

Israel has the largest monuments in The World for The Holocaust.

Yad Vashem has memorials for LGBT+, Romani, Freemasons & Jehovah Witnesses & Disabled people.

Jews have continuously fought for the other communities
(HT/ @GnasherJew & @HurryUpHarry) pic.twitter.com/CJaHYgGp3p

— Festive Fionn 🕎🎄😷 (@Fionn_Grunspan) December 13, 2020

Scarlett Johansson criticized for being Zionist

Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson’s recent intervention on behalf of civil rights in Egypt is prompting a mixed response there, ranging from gratitude to antisemitism.

Johansson, who is Jewish, was one of several celebrities to weigh in earlier this month against the arrest of four employees of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a Cairo human rights organization. They were swept up amid a wave of arrests of critics of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

“They all face bogus charges that could lead to many more years in prison. In fact, their only crime has been to stand up for the dignity of Egyptians,” Johansson said in the video published on the group’s YouTube page Dec. 1. Amnesty International launched a separate campaign for their release.

Three of the four workers have since been released. While some Egyptians have thanked Johansson for getting involved, others have suggested that she criticized Egypt’s leadership because she is Jewish.

Nashat al-Dihi, a presenter and commentator on TeN TV, said she “supports the Zionist products and it is well known that she is Jewish and that she’s on the Israelis’ side,” Mako News reported. Johansson drew criticism in 2014 after she appeared in an ad for SodaStream when the Israeli company had a factory in the West Bank.

Ohio State University’s ‘Day of Action’ Leads to Anger, Lies, and Misinformation

During an October 27 Ohio State University (OSU) Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) event, facts became irrelevant. And the dozen-or-so students in attendance became a dozen-or-so more casualties of rage politics, a psycholinguistic maneuver seen throughout history to rally crowds of people into a state of anger unescorted by reasoning.

The event was a response to a late September announcement by Zoom that Leila Khaled, a member of the US-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), could not use its platform. (Khaled was a scheduled participant on a panel sponsored by San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies program.)

The OSU event began with a monologue by the SJP chapter’s president that propagated gross inaccuracies and hyperboles of Middle Eastern history. The audience was told that Israel colonized Palestine, committed a genocide against the native Palestinians, and continues to operate an apartheid state, where Israelis are the superior majority and Palestinians are the inferior minority.

This narrative was then supplemented by a pre-recorded video of Leila Khaled speaking, justifying her terrorist acts by expounding on the propaganda spouted by SJP’s leader just seconds before.

Of course, if the issues were analyzed objectively, the audience would see through the speakers’ lies.

For instance, if they examined Palestinian population statistics and then the speakers’ claim that the Israeli government has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people for decades, they would be confused upon discovering that the Palestinian population is one of the fastest-growing in the world.

The BBC Jerusalem bureau’s unsatisfactory ticking of the impartiality box

On December 7th the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page featured a short report by the Jerusalem bureau’s Tom Bateman headlined “Gaza imposes strict measures as cases surge” taken from the site’s live page.

The final paragraph of that report states:
“Gaza is blockaded by Israel – it says to stop weapons getting in – and is controlled by the militant group Hamas. Rounds of conflict with Israel, and Palestinian political divisions, have left its health system fragile and ill-resourced.”

Instead of providing readers with a proper explanation of the years of Islamist terrorism against Israeli civilians that make the blockade necessary, Bateman resorts to the BBC’s standard ‘Israel says’ formula while using the euphemistic term “militant” to describe an internationally designated terrorist organisation.

He likewise fails to adequately inform audiences that the reason those euphemistically portrayed “Palestinian political divisions” – i.e. the Hamas-Fatah split – have resulted in a chronic shortage of medical supplies is because the Palestinian Authority has used that and other methods to put pressure on Hamas.

Anti-Semitism From Outer Space

In the century since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first published, it has appeared in a variety of guises, but none stranger, perhaps, than a 1991 edition. It begins with a brief, deceptively conventional description of its English translator, Victor Marsden, and its Russian editor, Sergius Nilus, but then it adds this prefatory passage:
So be it and, again, may ye be given into the hearing and understanding of that which is being given unto you for it is the direct PROTOCOLS as given forth from the ANTI-CHRIST TO HIS PEOPLE FOR THE FINAL TAKING OF PLANET EARTH! IF YE KNOW NOT THINE ENEMY, HOW CAN YE STAND AGAINST HIM? SALU!

The phrasing may strike one as a bit odd, even archaic, in style, but the substance is more or less consistent with theological anti-Semitism in its emphasis on the threat posed by Antichrist. Odder than the language, however, is the authorship, for the passage quoted is said to come from a 9 1/2-foot-tall extraterrestrial from the Pleiades named Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn.

His messages from outer space have appeared since 1989 in a series of periodicals with changing names but similar contents, which, for simplicity’s sake, I have termed the “Phoenix publications,” not after the city but after the name of Hatonn’s spaceship. The publications first appeared in Tehachapi, California, but the offices were later transferred to Las Vegas. The communications from Hatonn are not, strictly speaking, examples of channeling but are said to be received as coded radio transmissions by an amanuensis Hatonn identifies as “Dharma” but who in fact is a woman named Doris Ekker of Tehachapi. In addition to numerous brief anti-Semitic references, Hatonn has on at least two occasions “transmitted” the complete text of the Protocols, together with his own commentary. In certain respects, Hatonn deals with the Protocols in ways that are indistinguishable from those of terrestrial anti-Semites, but in other respects he extends their reach in troubling ways.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Condemns Toppling of Kiev Menorah in Antisemitic Incident

The Foreign Minister of Ukraine on Sunday strongly condemned the toppling of a menorah last week in the capital city of Kiev, saying there is “no place for antisemitism” in Ukraine.

Andrey Rachkov filmed himself toppling the giant menorah on Dec. 10, apparently motivated by his antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology, Ukrainian news outlet Zik reported.

In the video, posted on social media, Rachkov said the vandalism was “how you need to handle strangers engaged in the usurpation of power, occupation of territories, genocide.” He has been charged with hooliganism and could face up to five years in prison.

Rachkov apparently attempted to topple a second menorah on Dec. 11, but was unable to do so because it was bolted to the ground.

The United Jewish Community of Ukraine said it considers Rachkov’s “actions and statements to be antisemitism and calls on law enforcement agencies to investigate objectively.”

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated on Twitter, “I condemn in strongest terms Thursday’s brutal attack on a Jewish Menorah in Kyiv.”

“I welcome the swift reaction by law enforcement agencies identifying the perpetrator,” he added. “He now faces criminal charges and I’m convinced justice will be served.”

“No place for antisemitism in Ukraine,” he asserted.

Le Carre: ‘Extraordinary’ Israel, ‘crackling with debate, rocked me to my boots’

John le Carre, the master spy novelist who died Sunday aged 89, had a long fascination and sympathy for the Jewish people and a deep admiration for Israel.

Jewish characters were interwoven in his many novels, and his research into the 1983 novel “The Little Drummer Girl” gave him his first real exposure to Israel with a visit that “rocked” him, he said in a rare 1998 interview with Douglas Davis of the Jewish World Review.

“Israel,” he told Davis, “rocked me to my boots. I had arrived expecting whatever European sentimentalists expect — a re-creation of the better quarters of Hampstead [in London]. Or old Danzig, or Vienna or Berlin. The strains of Mendelssohn issuing from open windows of a summer’s evening. Happy kids in seamen’s hats clattering to school with violin cases in their hands.”

Instead, what he recalled finding was “the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future.”

“No nation on earth,” he said, “was more deserving of peace — or more condemned to fight for it.”

Smiley & me? No, no, no! Ex-Mossad chief on his non-link to le Carré’s antihero

John le Carré introduced readers to George Smiley, the bespectacled, self-effacing, and rapier-sharp British overseas intelligence officer, in his novel “Call for the Dead,” published in 1961. At precisely that time, in the real world, Efraim Halevy, the bespectacled, self-effacing, and rapier-sharp British-born intelligence officer, was just starting his career in the Mossad.

As le Carre’s fictional antihero — later immortalized on TV by the late, great Sir Alec Guinness — made his betrayal-paved path to the helm of “The Circus” (the author’s thinly veiled MI6), Halevy was making a similar, albeit considerately more sedate, ascent: Smiley was running the Circus by the end of 1973’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”; Halevy, having left the Mossad as its deputy chief in 1995, was urgently called back by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to head the agency in 1998 in order to salvage Israel’s relations with Jordan. A furious king Hussein was threatening to rupture the then-four-year-old peace treaty because the Mossad had embarked on, failed, and, worst of all, got its agents caught in an attempt to assassinate Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal in broad daylight on the streets of Amman.

With the death at 89 of Smiley’s creator, The Times of Israel spoke Monday with Halevy, who is 86 and thriving, to discuss any similarities between le Carré’s fictional spymaster and himself.

I once happened to find myself standing behind Halevy in a line at passport control at Heathrow Airport, and chuckled to myself at the notion of this avuncular, silver-haired gentleman passing quietly into the country of his birth — by all appearance a most mild and unremarkable fellow, with a hidden history whose details may not be fully known for a few more decades yet.

Israeli Athlete Makes History After Winning Two Medals in Europe

Israeli gymnast Artem Dolgopyat made history on Sunday, after winning the gold medal for the floor exercise at the European Championships, in addition to a bronze medal for vault with a score of 14.766.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Dolgopyat on Twitter, saying “all citizens of Israel are proud of you.”

Israeli gymnast Alexander Myakinin later won the bronze medal on the high bar event, getting a score of 14.200.

The win puts the two athletes on a promising path for the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, adding to various other fields that Israel has made strides in, including judo and baseball.

Israel – from Startup Nation to Impact Nation

This blog release is on the growing influence of Impact/ESG in Israel and the World and some highlights of the Israelimpactsummit hosted by Tech for Good and the announcement of the formation of The Israeli Forum for Impact Economy

2020 Is the year of Covid19, but it is the year when the Startup Nation become the Scaleup Nation. Suddenly there are 20+ Israeli unicorns (private companies with a valuation of more than $1 billion)

What has given rise to this is Innovation. Not only Innovation but Social Impact. I previously wrote a blog – Putting Customers first pays benefits on Market Caps.

These Companies are making a Global Impact. 2020 will be remembered for Covid19 but also the year Impact Investing, Impact Reporting, ESG, Climate Change became mainstream. Covid19 has highlighted the inequalities of people and the need to help the weaker elements of society.

I recently founded CFO-Israel a resource to help CEOs, Directors, and finance leaders. I coined the phrase Where Innovation meets ESG. ESG Is the acronym for Environment, Social, Governance.

This phrase is probably the most significant challenge facing Society today. Both Innovation and ESG challenge us as Individuals, as Governments, as Corporates and NGOs.

Israel’s OrCam reportedly seeks New York IPO at $3 billion valuation

Israel’s OrCam Technologies, a developer of devices to assist the blind and visually impaired, is seeking to hold an initial public offering of shares in New York in 2021, to raise $300 million at a valuation of $3 billion, financial website Calcalist reported on Monday without saying where it got the information.

Before the share offering, the firm plans to raise funds from private investors for a total of $150-$200 million, at a valuation of $1.5 billion to $2 billion, the report said.

There was no immediate comment by a spokesman for the firm about the Calcalist report.

OrCam was founded in 2010 by Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram, the same entrepreneurs who set up Mobileye, a maker of self-driving and assisted driving technologies that was sold to Intel in 2017 for $15.3 billion after it listed shares on the Nasdaq in 2014 at a valuation of $5.3 billion.

OrCam’s MyEye device is a finger-sized device that attaches to any pair of eyeglasses. Using artificial intelligence software, the device is able to read printed and digital text out loud, but discreetly, from any surface in real time. The device also recognizes people’s faces, and identifies consumer products, colors and currency.

The firm has raised some $129 million to date from investors including Intel Capital and Israeli institutional investors Clal Insurance and Meitav Dash, an investment management company, according to the database of Start-Up Nation Central.

The Sassoon Family Collection

The silver ritual objects, manuscripts, and textiles featured in the upcoming auction, Sassoon: A Golden Legacy, to be held at Sotheby’s in New York on Dec. 17, were assembled by members of the fabled Sassoon family—also known as the “Rothschilds of the East”—over the course of more than a century. The provenance of the items on sale ranges geographically from Western Europe to the Far East and chronologically from the 11th to the 20th centuries.

The patriarch of the Sassoon dynasty, David (1792-1864), was one of seven children born in Baghdad to his father Sassoon ben Saleh (1750-1830), a wealthy businessman who served as chief treasurer to the local Ottoman pashas and nasi (president) of the Babylonian Jewish community. Because of the practice of some Jewish families for sons to add their father’s given name to their own, David came to be known as David Sassoon, whence the surname. After receiving a traditional Jewish education, David married Hannah (Aziza) Joseph of Basra (1792-1826), who bore him four children in Baghdad; following her premature death, he wed Flora (Farha) Hayyim (1812/1814-1887), mother of 10 further daughters and sons in Bombay. In the late 1820s, persecution by Daud Pasha of Baghdad forced most of the family to leave the city and settle in Bushire (present-day Bandar Bushehr, Iran).

In 1832, having relocated to Bombay (present-day Mumbai, India), David founded a company, David Sassoon and Sons (later: David Sassoon & Co.), that quickly came to dominate the opium and cotton trades in the Persian Gulf, India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan and, with time, expanded into numerous other commodities and fields as well, including banking and real estate. Like Mayer Amschel Rothschild before him, David dispatched his sons to important financial centers and trade posts in order to found new branches of the family business. His success and the prospect of employment by his company induced other Baghdadi Jews, including such future entrepreneurs as Ellis Kadoorie and Silas Hardoon, to immigrate to India and points farther east, sometimes helping to found new Jewish communities upon their arrival.

David Sassoon’s fourth son, Reuben (1834-1905), who grew up in India, was recognized early on as mathematically gifted, quick-witted, wise, industrious, commercially savvy, and well-mannered; it was said of him that he had no enemies. When he came of age, he was sent by his father to conduct family business first in Hong Kong, then in Shanghai, but in 1860 he was called back to Bombay. Following his father’s passing, one of his older brothers required assistance in London, and so Reuben, his family, and his widowed mother moved there in 1867. Soon after his arrival, he purchased a significant portion of the holdings of Philip Salomons (1796-1867), one of the earliest collectors of antique Judaica. To this he added beautiful and historic items from Jewish centers across Europe.

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