This from the IDF:

150 Foreign Paratroopers Arrive in Israel for its 60th Celebrations.

On Friday and Saturday 150 foreign paratroopers, representing various armies around the world, arrived in Israel. Amongst them, are paratroopers from the US, England, France, Spain, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Singapore, South Africa, Canada, Greece, Italy and Switzerland. The paratroopers arrived in Israel in order to take part in Israel's 60th celebrations and to salute the IDF.

The paratroopers will jump together at the IDF event on Israel Independence Day, May 8th, in which 120 paratroopers will parachute along the beaches of Ashkelon. A rehearsal for this jump will take place on May 5th, at Palmahim beach at 10:00-13:00.

On May 4th, the paratroopers will stay at the IDF Parachuting School. They will formally enter Tel-Nof base at 8:00, where, the senior foreign officers will meet the commander of the parachuting school, Colonel Dror Paltin, and IDF senior officers. Together, the paratroopers will train for the Independence Day event including practices jumps at sea. At 14:30 the Oketz unit will explain their capabilities to the foreign paratroopers. Later on, a ceremony will be held at the IDF Paratroopers Memorial. The ceremony will be military in nature, and the paratroopers will wear their uniforms. The Greek paratroopers will lay a laurels at the memorial. A Dutch paratrooper, Jesper Nels, the grandchild of Righteous Gentiles, will plant an olive tree next to the memorial. Nels will also meet the family of the man that was saved by his grandfather.

On Memorial Day for the fallen, the foreign paratroopers will participate in memorial ceremonies throughout the country including ceremonies in Ashkelon, Yad-Mordechay, Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem and the Latrun site.

In addition they will visit technological farms and will experience the latest technological advances in development of the Negev in Revivim and Sede-Boqer. They will also take part in a jeep tour in the desert. The paratroopers will visit Jerusalem and will follow in the footsteps of the Jerusalem brigade which fought in the Six Day War.

One of the participants, a paratrooper named Yoni, serving in the French Foreign Legion is named after Yoni Netanyahu, the renowned commander who was killed in the famous Entebbe operation. He will fulfill his dream and get the chance to wear the IDF's Paratrooper wings.

Not surprisingly the mainstream media is using Israel's 60th birthday as an opportunity to scold Israel for, what else, daring to exist. It seems to Seraphic Secret that the best way of celebrating Israel's miraculous birthday is by publishing this fine article by Efraim Karsh, an article which refutes the endless libels that are hurled against the Jewish State. The most recent libel, a blood libel really, is that the Jewish state, should not be a Jewish state. These liberal-Arab-Peace Now critics gently suggest that the Jewish State should convert to a Whatever Status, which translates into a future Islamic State.

Just what the world needs.

Another happy-go-lucky Islamic fascist regime.

I don't get it. Why don't these critics just pick up and move to beautiful downtown Gaza?

I have another suggestion. Let the 22 members of the Organization of Islamic States give up their identity as Islamic states because as we all know, they are each brutal tyrannies founded on the repression of minority religions, the repression of women, homosexuals, and the complete lack of economic transparency. Oh, and except for Iran each and every Islamic country is Judenrein. It's an open secret that the 30,000 Persian Jews live in utter fear and dhimmitude. Members of my Persian community here in Los Angeles often tell me stories of the every day horrors their relatives endure under the thumb of the Iranian secret police.

Anyway, here's the Karsh article from Commentary Magazine.

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.

The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

To read the complete article, please click here.

The Fifth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture will take place on Sunday June 15, 2008, at 10 AM at the Young Israel of Century City, followed by a brunch.

Young Israel of Century City
9317 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90035

We are pleased to announce that we have engaged Rabbi Dr. Gil S. Perl to present this year’s lecture.

Gil Perl is the Dean of the Margolin Hebrew Academy / Feinstone Yeshiva of the South, a Prek-12 day school serving the Jewish community of Memphis. Before arriving in Memphis, Dr. Perl served as an instructor of Modern Jewish History in Yeshiva University and as the Associate Head of School in Yeshiva University's High School for Boys. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, his Masters and Doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, and rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University. As a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, Rabbi Perl was twice awarded Harvard's prestigious Certificate of Distinction in Teaching and in the Spring of 2006 he was named Yeshiva University's Lillian F. and William L. Silber Professor of the Year.

The title of Rabbi Perl’s lecture is: “What Was the Rosh Yeshiva Reading? Intellectual Openness in 19th Century Lithuania.”

We look forward to seeing all our Seraphic Friends and relatives at the lecture.

Learning Torah was Ariel's greatest joy. There is no better way of honoring Ariel's memory than by participating in this lecture series.

May Ariel's neshama have an aliyah.

You do not have to RSVP to attend. The lecture and brunch are courtesy of the Avrech Family and Friends.

The Jewish movie star is Sylvia Sydney. Real name Sophia Kosow, 1910 - 1999.

As I suspected, the privacy of e-mailing answers resulted in greater participation.

Mazal Tov to all those who guessed correctly. First in were movie-maven sisters: Buttercup and Tamster, who are three for three in our “Who's the Jewish Movie Star Quiz,” — our reigning champs.

Toronto Pearl came in with the correct answer a few minutes later, and Miranda Rose Smith followed a day later, but Miranda is in another time zone so she's at a disadvantage.

Sylvia Sidney, publicity photo from Paramount.

Seraphic Friend Toronto Pearl sent us this picture of Sylvia Sidney's grandfather.

Moyshe Kosovski, father of Mr. Victor Kossow and grandfather of Hollywood screen actress Sylvia Sidney. Sidney was her stepfather's name. From: The Grodno Site

Seraphic Friend Miranda Rose Smith writes: “Did you know she [Sylvia Sidney] was an embroiderer? I picked up a copy of her book on needlepoint in a used bookstore.”

What would Seraphic Secret be without our loyal and savvy readers?

Sylvia Sidney's rise to stardom is, sadly, linked to the tragic fall of Clara Bow, 1905 - 1965, one of the greatest actresses in the history of motion pictures.

Clara Bow, at the height of her popularity she received 40,000 fan letters a week.

Bow, “The It Girl” was an instinctive performer whose radiant presence lit up the screen from 1924 to 1930. She was from Brooklyn, the product of an impoverished, dysfunctional family. Her mother, a part time prostitute, was mad and twice tried to murder Bow. Clara's father raped her when she was a teenager. With just a fifth grade education, Clara dreamed of escaping her miserable life and getting into motion pictures. She won a beauty contest, secured a screen test, came out to California where she clawed her way to the top, performing in endless programmers before she finally broke through as a genuine star.

Producer B.P. Schulberg had her under personal contract. He discovered a formula that clicked with the public and sometimes had her working in three movies simultaneously. At the height of her stardom during the silent era Bow was the most popular actress in Hollywood receiving 40,000 fan letters a week.

But Bow's personal demons, a series of public scandals, a grueling schedule, and the coming of sound conspired to destroy her magnificent career.

By 1930, Clara's value to Paramount was no longer what it once was. Schulberg, who owed his success to Bow, called her “Crisis-a-Day-Clara.”

He concentrated instead on his new protege—and mistress—the beautiful and waif like Sylvia Sidney. The contrast between the two actresses could not have been greater. Whereas Clara Bow was coarse and gutter-mouthed. Sidney was refined, a lady. Where Clara was an unpredictable genius, pure instinct, Sidney was a thoughtful, stage-trained actress.

Sylvia Sidney, publicity photo when she was under contract to
B.P. Schulberg, early 1930's.

In 1931, with her nerves shattered and her contract dissolved by Schulberg, Bow returned to her dressing room to pack her belongings, there she discovered that it was already assigned to Sylvia Sidney.

Bow was finished. Hollywood's biggest star was twenty-five years old.

B.P. Schulberg abandoned his wife and children for Sylvia Sidney. He then exited Paramount with Sidney and produced a series of pictures for her that failed at the box office. He gambled away his fortune. Sidney walked out on him when she caught him in bed with two prostitutes.

Schulberg died in 1957. Thirty years later, Sylvia Sidney was nominated for an Emmy award for her touching performance in An Early Frost, a made for television movie about AIDS.

The best book about Clara Bow is by screenwriter David Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild.

My favorite Sylvia Sidney movies are Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotoge. And Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once. Her delicacy, understated acting style, and vulnerability are used perfectly in both films. Unfortunately, these performances locked her into a type she could not escape and she was cast again and again in the same roles as the long-suffering heroine. Sidney became bored with the parts assigned to her and returned to the stage as often as possible.

Sylvia Sidney, studio portrait, early 1930's.

Though not observant, this fine actress never tried to hide her Jewish roots like so many other Hollywood Jews. Sylvia Sidney was horrified by news of The Holocaust and was determined to do something for her people. Like most American Jews, Sidney must have had relatives trapped and doomed under the Nazi onslaught.

In 1943 Bronx born Sylvia Sidney participated in the dramatic pageant “We Will Never Die.”

Determined to alert the American public about the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, [screenwriter Ben] Hecht authored a dramatic pageant that he called “We Will Never Die.” (The title derived from a biblical verse affirming Jewish national survival.) With its cast of hundreds, “We Will Never Die” would be an extraordinary production in every sense of the word. According to Hecht’s plan, the actors would stand in front of two forty-foot-high tablets of the Ten Commandments. They would read aloud a long list of Jews who made important contributions to civilization throughout history. They would describe the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in painful detail. A group of children, garbed in white rags and their faces painted gray to resemble corpses, would quietly say the words “Remember us” over and over again. The performance would culminate in the dramatic reciting of “Kaddish,” the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, by fifty elderly rabbis who had escaped from Europe.

We Will Never Die, 1943.

Edward G. Robinson, real name Emanuel Goldenberg, and Sylvia Sidney,
two of the stars of "We Will Never Die," reviewing the script with director
Billy Rose.

I'm aware of only one book about Sylvia Sidney, Sylvia: A Memoir of Hollywood Star Sylvia Sidney by Sally Miller. Have not read it, so I'm clueless.

Lobby Card for Clara Bow's Wild Party, 1929. Directed by Dorothy Arzner.

Douglas Sirk Directs Linda Darnell

Less Dialogue is More: Mervyn LeRoy, Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor and Waterloo Bridge.

Alla Nazimova

Charlton Heston: A Moment of Silence

Lilyan Tashman.

Carmel Myers: The Rabbi's Beautiful Daughter

Colleen Moore: The Stars and Stripes

Colleen Moore's Wedding Night

One Hairstyle, Three Memoirs: Alma Rubens, Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks

Theda Bara: The Vamp Adopts the Troops

Movie Magazines: They Don't Print 'em Like They Used To

Alma Rubens: Dope Fiend, But Not a Jewess

Wallace Reid: Hollywood Shooting Star

Olive Thomas: Hollywood's First Suicide

Mary Pickford: The Greatest Movie Star

Seraphic Secret Chats with Actress Coleen Gray about John Wayne, Howard Hawks, and Stanley Kubrick

Louis B. Mayer Goes to Shul

Susan Peters: The Great Unknown and Tragic Actress

The Blond Machine Gun: Jean Harlow

Peg Entwistle & The Hollywood Sign

Brigitte Bardot & Sean Connery in Shalako—Sorta

Michael Kidd: The Last Dance

Haveil Havalim #164 the No Name Edition is live.

We'd like to thank Simply Jews for including Seraphic Secret's The Battle of Algiers Never Ends in this fine edition.

“For those who are new to Haveil Havalim a bit of introduction from an excellent HH # 162 by Yaaqov Ben Yehudah (who, as it appears, based the text below on Batya's original):”

Founded by Soccer Dad, Haveil Havalim is a carnival of Jewish blogs — a weekly collection of Jewish & Israeli blog highlights, tidbits and points of interest collected from blogs all around the world. It's hosted by different bloggers each week and coordinated by Jack. The term 'Haveil Havalim,' which means "Vanity of Vanities," is from Qoheleth, (Ecclesiastes) which was written by King Solomon. King Solomon built the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and later on got all bogged down in materialism and other 'excesses' and realized that it was nothing but 'hevel,' or in English, 'vanity.'

Who's the Jewish Movie Star?

She starred opposite such great actors as Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Fredric March, George Raft and Cary Grant.

Instead of posting your answer in the comments section, send your guess directly to robert.avrech@gmail.com.

Good luck.

Answer on Sunday.

Karen and I wish all our friends a wonderful miracle in Shabbat .

An important commentary from Caroline B. Glick, the woman who should be Prime Minister of Israel.

Another ordinary week has come and gone in southern Israel.

Bombarded by rockets from Hamastan in Gaza, residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and nearby towns watched as their national leaders conducted negotiations by proxy with Hamas to release hundreds of terrorists in Israeli jails and consolidate Hamas's weapons supply lines by suspending Israeli counter-terror operations during a "cease-fire."

Between trips to the local bomb shelter, they watched Israeli trucks deliver fuel and supplies to Hamas in Gaza in the morning; and they watched Hamas store the fuel and supplies in depots near the border in the afternoon. In the evening they watched news reports echoing Hamas' claims that Israel is depriving Gazan hospitals of fuel and Gazan civilians of basic foodstuffs.

Wednesday night they tried having a Yom Hashoah ceremony in Sderot but it was interrupted by incoming missiles. For its part, Hamas marked the Holocaust with a documentary series claiming that the genocide of European Jewry was a satanic Jewish plot to cull the Jewish population of its handicapped and to manipulate the world media.

Hamas captured headlines this week with its allegation that Israel was responsible for the death of a Palestinian woman and four of her children in an explosion in Bet Hanoun in Gaza as the IDF targeted Hamas terrorists from the air. The IDF conducted two investigations showing that the woman and her children were killed by something else: a secondary explosion caused by bombs the Hamas terrorists — one of whom was her husband — were carrying at the time the IDF targeted them.

To read Caroline Glickman's complete article, please click here.

Hat Tip: Seraphic Friends, Joel Wiesz, Yonoson Fisgus, M.D.

Keep in mind that sometime in the next few months the IAF will be flying into Persia—on an extremely complex but necessary mission—to halt another Holocaust.

I believe that Israel is sending an unequivocal message to Iran and to the world with this overflight of Auschwitz.

The Israeli pilot reads a message to the world: “For all those who were murdered, we will never let it happen again. We are here. We will fight for you.”

Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, Jackie Danicki

Good job, Jimmy!

Yup, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is being observed today in Israel and America, Hamas commissioned a television program that claims a gruesome conspiracy between the Nazis and the pre-state Jewish leadership.

And don't forget Hamas has endorsed Barack Obama.

No wonder the Arab world hates Israel and Jews with such passion. They are fed lies from cradle to grave.

Let me repeat the obvious: the wars between Israel and her Arab neighbors has nothing to do with so-called occupation, boundaries, walls, or a Palestinian state.

It's about Jews living and breathing in the mideast.

From The Jerusalem Post:

According to the documentary's narrator, Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion decided that Jewish “disabled and handicapped are a burden to the state,” after which “the Satanic Jews” —the film cuts to a picture of a hassidic Jew — “thought up an evil plot to be rid of the burden of disabled and handicapped” — the film then cuts to piles of emaciated corpses — “in twisted criminal ways.”

“This is official Hamas TV,” explained PMW director Itamar Marcus. “It's owned and totally controlled by the Hamas leadership in Gaza, and it goes out by satellite to the whole Arab-speaking world.”

And remember, Israel is supplying Gaza with the energy and fuel with which this and other fine educational movies are produced.

Keep it up Israel.

National suicide on your 60'th birthday, makes perfect sense.

What to do?

Well, I know a few ladies who have a few common sense proposals.

Brigitte Bardot takes aim at jihadists in France.

Carole Lombard says: “Bomb Gaza back to the stone age.”

Lillian Gish vows: “I'll pick off those pesky jihad varmints one by one!”

Peggy Cummins is Gun Crazy and will fight the Islamists to the death.

Zhang Ziyi is an old fashioned girl. She'll disembowel the Islamofacists.

Jeremiah Wright performs at the National Press Club:

“This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright,” Jeremiah Wright said. “It is an attack on the black church.”

He goes on to appoint himself as the typical voice of Black American religious traditions.

Okay. Good to know.

Interpolation #1:

Seraphic Secret anxiously waits for hundreds if not thousands of black pastors and church lay leaders to deny Wright's outrageous libel. We look forward to a public denunciation of Wright's claim from members of the black Christian community.

So far:

Nothing.

Seraphic Secret suspects that Wright just might be right.

End Interpolation #1:

“Why am I speaking out now?” Wright challenges. “If you think I'm going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition and my grandma, you got another thing coming.”

Wright goes on, once again, to justify the September 11 terrorist attacks by preaching: “America's chickens are coming home to roost.”

I claim no expertise in Christian scripture, but I do know that Jesus was Jewish—which might come as a surprise to Wright—and the quote below represents normative Rabbinic Judaism. Using this particular Torah to defend Islamic terrorism indicates a depth of cynicism that is stunning.

Thus, Obama's ex-mentor and ex-spiritual advisor is revealed as just another slick race hustler—hello Jesse Jackson, hello Al Sharpton—a greedy demagogue determined to keep American blacks down on the plantation where they can be exploited by the Democratic party and a cadre of self-appointed thugs, AKA Community Leaders, who feed off a mind-set of victimhood and a litany of historical despair.

Anyway, here's Wright—as racist and intellectually brutish as the slave holders who manipulated the Bible to justify the evil of slavery: “Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles.”

Biblical principles?

As channeled by Osama Bin Laden.

Wright moves on to his good buddy Louis Farrakhan, the black version of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color.”

Barack Obama claims that until now he was ignorant of Wright's Jew-hatred, of Wright's pathological hatred of America, of Wright's assertion that the American government has purposely injected AIDS into the Black population, of Wright's endless defense of the indefensible—including Hamas.

Obama would have us believe that for the past 20 years Jeremiah Wright has been all warm and cuddly whenever Barack Obama was in Church. But magically, whenever Obama was absent from Church the good Pastor went from Jekyll to Hyde. Yup, suddenly Barack no longer recognizes the man who brought him to Christ.

I guess Jeremiah Wright is now Barack Obama's ex-ex Pastor and ex-ex Spiritual Advisor.

Whoa. I thought Barack could no more disown his ex-ex Pastor than he could disown his white grandmother?

Oh wait, he did disown his white grandmother. The woman who raised and sacrificed for him. In fact, he threw her under the bus. I guess that makes her his ex-ex white grandmother.

As Edward G. Robinson confides to Fred MacMurray about his infallible instinct for detecting liars in Billy Wilder's towering movie Double Indemnity: “The little man in my stomach is acting up. And the little man is never wrong.”

I'm eating some awesome shmurah matzah left over from Pesach and I'm watching Barack Obama on TV and the little man in my stomach is not acting up—he's doing sumersaults!

Interpolation #2:

Seraphic Secret was disheartened to observe that the NAACP chose to honor Jeremiah Wright just the other night. Wright's supporters emphasize with tedious regularity that Wright has accomplished many good works during his career.

This is the “making the trains run on time” argument. It is beneath contempt. The issue is quite simple. Wright is mired in a political theology which, if espoused by a white man, would properly be denounced as ignorant, angry, racist, separatist, and utterly backward. A white man and his congregation would be shunned by any decent society, not honored nor excused.

End interpolation #2:

Obama has been attending Wright's church for 22 years.

Obama has already told us that Wright is like a member of his family.

Obama has already told us that Wright has been a central mentor and advisor in his life.

And we know that Obama has contributed $40,000 to Trinity Church, where Black Liberation Theology, a crackpot bigotry, is known to all members of the church—except for clueless Barack Obama. For the past 20 years as Jeremiah Wright ranted and raved the Harvard educated Senator was, y'know, snoozing.

We also know that Wright performed Barack's marriage ceremony to the not so proud of her country Michelle.

Wright baptized Obama's two daughters.

Barack Obama brings his two daughters to Wright's church to worship. Obviously, Obama sees nor hears nothing wrong in Wright's church.

There are two choices regarding Obama's relationship to Wright.

1. Barack Obama is lying about what he knows and when he knew about Wright's poisonous views.

2. Barack Obama has deeply flawed judgement, and the closest he should ever get to the White House is on a guided tour of the West Wing.

Interpolation #3:

Any Jew who supports Barack Obama is delusional.

Whoops! Just discovered a whole batch of seriously delusional Jews. Wanna guess which candidate they're supporting?

End Interpolation #3:

Seraphic Secret often links to Professor Rubin's articulate articles. We have an ongoing correspondence with the good professor about Israel, terrorism, strategy and yes, even movies and old time Hollywood. Thus, it's a distinct honor and pleasure to bring this excellent book to our reader's attention.

“THE ISRAEL-ARAB READER”

Seventh edition
Edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin

Now available from Penguin publishers is this new edition of one of the most highly respected, widely used reference books on the Middle East, documenting the Arab-Israel conflict and peace process from its inception to the present day.

The book provides almost 300 primary texts covering more than a century of history. It documents the British mandate and early attempts to handle the conflict; Israel's independence and the outbreak of wars; international diplomatic efforts to make peace including the 1990s’ peace process and its breakdown. Materials are presented reflecting the positions of Arab leaders and states, Europeans, Israel, Palestinians, the USSR, and the United States. The texts of international resolutions and agreements, as well as accords made during the peace process, are also provided.
The result is a comprehensive work suitable for reading, reference, and teaching.

To order click here: Buy Now!

For detailed information on this book, follow this link: GLORIA Publication Catalog

Hedy Lamarr strongly urges you to purchase The Israel-Arab Reader. Scan courtesy Dr. Macro.