“Between pictures I go away. I think that is the best way to achieve happiness in Hollywood, the only way to keep one’s perspective. If you stay too close to the motion picture colony you lose your sense of values.”
— Helen Twelvetrees
Tonight begins the holiday of Passover in which Jews celebrate deliverance from Egyptian bondage.
In order to escape the shackles of slavery, the vast machinery of the mighty Egyptian state had to be crushed. Those who wielded absolute power were reduced to nothingness. G-d did this not only to diminish the physical power of a pitiless slave state, but to begin the process of making free the minds of the Israelites.
Slavery is an insidious institution, not only because it shackles the body, but it creates a mentality where the slave identifies with his master to such a degree that he becomes complicit in his own bondage. He loves his master and cannot imagine a world absent an overlord.
The Torah informs us that the generation that escaped Egypt died in the desert. It was only their children who were permitted to enter the land of Israel.
Why?
Because the generation that witnessed G-d’s mighty miracles were never able to free their minds from bondage. And G-d deemed such people unfit and unable to establish a national homeland.
Slavery warps the mind. Freedom, the slave comes to believe, is fraught with peril. Free choice appears like a black hole. Better to work, get fed, have a place to sleep, secure in the certainty of tomorrow rather than face the bewildering choices that confront a free man in a civil society.
One of my closest friends here in Los Angeles is a Holocaust survivor. Over 80 members of his family were murdered by the Nazis, including his mother and his baby sister. My friend, Sol, has told me, in exhaustive detail, about his years in Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald. I’ve heard sickening details of ghettos, gas chambers, torture, mass shootings, death marches, starvation, and disease — an endless catalog of human evil and depravity.
But the one topic Sol cannot talk about are the Jewish overseers: the Judenrat, and the Kapos, Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. Of these men and women, Sol just shakes his head in disbelief. The evil of the Nazis is comprehensible for evil is ever present. But the Jews who cooperated in the genocide of their own people is beyond imagination.
The Judenrat and kapos are still with us.
According to the great Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky we can recognize Jew-hatred when manifested against Israel by the 3 Ds: demonization, double standards and delegitimization. By this definition J Street is loudly and proudly anti Semitic. Jewish Voices for Peace has gone so far Progressive that they honored Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, an IslamoNazi Jew killer who was deported by the United States.
And the Democrat Party has gone full and poisonously Progressive anti-Israel.
American Jewish Progressives worship at the altar of the state. Their religion is not Torah Judaism but Progressive values. So closely do they identify with the power of government they don’t even realize that they are creating the apparatus that will enslave their children and their children’s children through an insidious web of government regulations and entitlements.
The Szyk Haggadah, Łódź, 1935, Arthur Szyk was the greatest Jewish illuminator since, well, ever.
Movie lovers know her as Lizabeth Scott, (1922 – 2015) the husky-voiced femme fatale of noir films from the 40s and 50s. She was born Emma Matzo of Scranton Pa. Her last name suggests that an ancestor back in the old country baked Passover Matzo. Her best film is “Dead Reckoning” (’47).
Frank Stella, American, b. 1936
The Butcher Came and Slew the Ox, from Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya, 1984
Hand-colored and collaged with lithographic, linoleum block, and screen printings
56 7/8 × 53 3/8 in. (144.5 × 135.6 cm)
A young Jewish girl in the American Joint Distribution Committee-supported Berlin-Mariendorf DP Camp shares matzahs with Captain J. Robbins, Jewish Chaplain for Berlin. Berlin, c 1946.
Bird’s Head Haggadah, by Menachem the Scribe
circa 1300
Handwritten on parchment; dark brown ink and tempera; square Ashkenazic script. This 14th century Haggadah is fascinating because all the human characters are depicted with, y’know, bird’s heads, more specifically a Griffin. Some think this was a way of getting around the charge of idolatry. Another view is that the illustration was meant to be playful, unthreatening images as a counter to European blood libels which claimed that Jews used Christian blood to bake matzoh.
Yemenite Passover Seder in Jerusalem. Note that they are eating the bitter herbs, 1939.
Rick McGinnis
Montreal, Sept. 2017
Sari Srulovitch
Seder Plate
Israel 2007, sterling silver bowls, anodized aluminum and silver plated brass box, textile fabric, 46 x 46 cm, height 5 cm.
El Lissitzky, Russian, 1890-1941
Cover, from Had Gadya Suite (Tale of a Goat), 1919
Lithograph on paper
10 3/4 × 10 in. (27.3 × 25.4 cm)
Eleanor Parker (’22 – ’13) was a brilliant actress who played comedy as deftly as she played drama. Her voice was film noir husky, and she used it like a musical instrument. Raised a Protestant, she converted to Judaism. “I think we’re all Jews at heart,” she told columnist Kay Gardella. “I wanted to convert for a long time.” Her daughter spent a summer working on a kibbutz, married an Israeli, and settled in Israel permanently. Parker’s best films are: Caged (’50) Detective Story (’51) Scaramouche (’52) Interrupted Melody (’55), and The King and Four Queens (’56).
Audrey Flack, American, b. 1931
Matzo Meal, c. 1962
Oil on canvas
14 1/8 × 18 1/4 in. (35.9 × 46.4 cm)
Classic image of Dovima wearing a Dior gown with elephants from the Cirque d’Hiver, photo by Richard Avedon, Paris, 1955
Seder Plate
Tiered Seder Set
Eastern Galicia or western Ukraine, 18th-19th century
Brass: cast and engraved; wood: painted and stained; ink on paper; silk: brocade; linen; cotton
13 3/4 × 14 in. (35 × 35.5 cm)
American Jewish soldiers celebrating Passover in Seoul, Korea, 1952
Golden Haggadah
(ca. 1320 -1330)
The Plauges of Egypt
Origin Spain, N. E., Catalonia (Barcelona?) Hebrew Script Sephardi square script, punctuated
Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Child on Forest Road
1958
Gelatin silver print
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved
“Moses Teaches the Children of Israel” by the great Israeli artist, Shalom of Safed.
“When I see Maria Montez on the screen she is so beautiful – I gasp. I look and I look. And I say that gorgeous creature. She is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Then I look at her again. Then I look in a mirror, and that gorgeous thing – she is me.”
– Maria Montez
George Ault
Black Night at Russell’s Corners, 1943
Three-tiered Seder plate
Moshe Zabari, Israeli, b. 1935
New York, New York, United States, 1984
Silver: fabricated, spun, hammered, embossed, welded, and forged; formed wire; lucite tiers
Overall: 14 1/2 × 18 1/4 in. (36.8 × 46.4 cm)
J.R. Everman
Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments, drive-in theater, Utah, 1958
A young Jewish girl holds up a hand-baked matzah for the camera. Teheran, Iran, c 1964. After the fall of the Shah and the rise of the IslamoNazi crazies (thanks a bunch Jimmy Carter) most of the Persian Jewish community emigrated to Israel and America.
Ethiopian Jewish embroidery of Jews baking matzoh.
Maayan Ariel wishes all our friends and relatives an inspirational Shabbat and a happy and kosher Passover,
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
NOTE: Click on video titles inside the thumbnail images, below, to open that video in YouTube
2 Comments
I got a good laugh out of the “Pesach cleaning” truck.
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My dental hygienist in Orange County is an Ethiopian Jew who was one of those rescued by the Israelis and she grew up in Israel. She is married to a white Jewish man and they go to Israel every year to see her family there. She and I have talked about American blacks and their obsession with victim status. She has been the object of “hate stares” by black women when she is out with her husband.
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