My beloved father, Rabbi Avraham Avrech, passed away on Saturday, Shabbat. He was 94 years old.
My father, Rabbi Abraham Avrech. This photo was taken when he was a student in Yeshiva University. Soon afterwards, he joined the Army as a Chaplain and served in the Rainbow Division.
The funeral is tomorrow morning.
I will be sitting shiva for seven days.
Seraphic Secret will be on hiatus until my shiva ends.
The 2014 Purim celebration begins on Saturday night March 15 and continues through the 16th.
On the holiday of Purim, Jews listen to a reading of Megillat Esther, send gifts of food to friends and neighbors, donate to the poor, attend a festive meal where we make a l’chaim—“Genocide averted, let’s eat!”—and frequently wear witty costumes.
Those good men of Ducky Dynasty have joined Seraphic Secret in this year’s Purim celebration.
“The Banquet of Esther and Ahasuerus” by Jan Victors, 1640s.
Today is the Fast of Purim which commemorates Esther’s three days of fasting in preparation for her meeting with King Ahasuerus.
It’s an old ( 5th century B.C.E.) but agnonizingly familiar story: An intolerant Jew-hater named Haman hatches a plan to annihilate the Jewish people in the ancient kingdom of Persia.
This is perfect.
A convicted IslamoNazi is working for the IRS.
At first, Seraphic Secret was surprised, even baffled, at this startling news. But then we got over our naiveté. After all, Obama & Co. actively support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. They forget, or perhaps do not wish to recall, that the MB is the same group of genocide-yearning IslamoNazis who assassinated Anwar Sadat and have vowed to do the same to any Arab Muslim who tries to make peace with Israel.
In the Arab Muslim world, the evil Jew/Zionist is the scapegoat upon which all the ills of society are heaped.
Arab Muslim propagandists claim that they don’t hate Jews; they are just criticizing Zionism. But of course, this is a lie designed to deflect attention from the Jew-hatred that is their mother’s milk.
And of course, Obama & Co are enabling this Jew-hatred.
Shirley Temple with Baby LeRoy cruising in a Fire Chief car, early 1930s.
The automobile represents freedom.
You climb into a car and go, go, go, whenever and wherever you want. The car is modern man’s path to liberty.
Contrast cars with trains.
Railroads are an expression of the collective. Individual identity is erased. You are at the mercy of a government-controlled system that turns citizens into passive cogs, at the mercy of by-the-book bureaucrats.
That’s why democrats/progressives/liberals/ (what are they calling themselves this week?) are obsessed with high-speed rail. The freedom of the road is repellent to big government fanatics. The ruling elite seek to regulate and control tobacco, food, calories, soda, education, light bulbs, toilets, health care, reproduction, cow flatulence, oxygen — every cell of your body.
In short: liberty is constricted by any and all means.
And all in the name of an amorphous, pre-adolescent concept: Fairness.
And you better believe that the chattering elite are the ones who get to define what’s fair and what’s unfair. Funny how that always works out in their favor.
Nazis just adored trains. And hey, the Italian fascists boasted that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Though Italian trains were about as effective and efficient as the Italian army. Which is to say: Not.
At a certain point, one must acknowledge the convergent philosophies of post-modern liberals and iron-fist fascists. Both ideologies assert the power of the state as the final arbiter of human affairs. Hence, the government replaces G-d and family as the center of man’s universe. It’s no surprise that the formal title of the Nazi party was “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”
Anyhoo.
Today, Hollywood celebrities make sure to be seen driving a Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, or any of the dopey but politically correct green cars. It is something of an open secret here among my Hollywood colleagues that the garage is fully stocked with BMW, Mercedes, Bentley, and for sure, a few Jags—for real driving.
But once upon a time Hollywood produced great stars who proudly posed with their autos, symbols of glamor, affluence, and freedom.
Russia, as Sarah Palin predicted they would in 2008, is invading Ukraine.
China hungrily eyes the Japanese Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Iran races toward the nuclear red line. In Syria, Bashar Assad, allied with Russia, slaughters thousands of own people — daily. The North Korean gulag starves millions and continues to build and test long-range missiles. Egypt is in a perpetual state of turmoil with each side accusing the other of being, get this, Jews. Iraq is ground zero for homicide bombers. Afghanistan is becoming a Taliban state… again. Lebanon slides closer to the abyss of sectarian civil war. And Fatah is on the verge of open civil war—when are they not?—as exiled terrorist leader Mohammed Dahlan, moves to depose terrorist leader Mahmoud Abbas.
And, oh yes, for all you feminists out there who agitate for the right to murder babies in the womb—of whom 84% are black—how about those honor hysterectomies,the latest atrocity authored by the Palestinians.
Protests on campus?
Of course not. The left are busy demonizing the Jewish State.
With such bloody global turmoil, President Obama moves decisively, and comes down hard on — Israel.
Yes, the community agitator with a history of Jew-hating BFFs, has chosen, once again, to hammer the Jewish State. The pretext? Apartment buildings. In the world according to Obama, Jews must be confined to a manageable ghetto. It’s not enough that the Arab and Muslim world is functionally Judenrein, for Obama and the genocidal Jew-haters of the left, the Jewish State does not even have the right to live in the Jewish State, which includes the ancient Jewish land of Judea and Samaria.
As far as Seraphic Secret is concerned, Jews have the right to live anywhere.
This monument to the genocidal Jew-killer Bohdan Khmelnytsky stands proudly in modern day Kiev.
The Pax Americana which defined and stabilized the post-Soviet world has been discarded by Obama and the Democrat party.
Under the focus-tested phrase “smart power” the Obama Democrats have embraced the inertia of nothingness as foreign policy.
Putin watched as Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, thereby betraying Israel and the Egyptian people; Putin grinned as Obama played Chamberlain to the nuclear Mullahs of Iran. And Putin laughed as Obama erased his Syrian red line, thereby allowing Putin to control the Syrian situation and rescue Assad’s machinery of slaughter. And how Putin must have danced a Hitlerian jig when Chuck Hagel announced that the American military is being eviscerated—in order to make it, um, stronger.
Vladimir, an old and ruthless KGB hand, no doubt recognized the duplicity of Hagel’s Soviet Newspeak.
Putin took the measure of Obama, and correctly concluded that America is willfully making itself over as a power averse, Western European welfare state.
Putin no longer has to worry about a geopolitical leadership that will put limits on his use of military power. There was a time when American presidents projected strength and leadership with the threat of force as a credible deterrent. But Obama’s “leading from behind” is code for surrender, a ghastly punch line for late night television. There is zero chance that Obama will use military force. As for sanctions, well, Putin will run rings around the hapless EU and the equally ineffectual community organizer.
Putin is a predatory wolf. Obama, a slice of meat.
And you better believe that the Chinese are watching Obama carefully.
They say that history repeats itself. This is not true. People repeat themselves. And Obama’s history of appeasement is about to play itself out once again.
In the meantime, the Jews of the Ukraine are under grave threat from all factions.
Anna May Wong (1905 – 1961) was the first American-Chinese movie star. Her long career spanned silent and sound movies, radio, stage and television. Her first film role was in Toll of the Sea (1922) one of the first movies produced in Technicolor. Tragically, the Production Code instituted by the studios to protect against government censorship, upheld anti-miscegenation laws. Thus, Wong was never cast as a leading lady opposite a Caucasian star. Her greatest disappointment, and a notorious outrage, was when MGM refused to cast her as O-lan, the leading role in their adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s huge best-seller, “The Good Earth.” Instead, the plum assignment went to the competent but dreary Luise Rainer. For most of her career, the enormously talented and beautiful Anna May was relegated to supporting roles and B movies, frequently as a stereotypical dragon lady. This evocative photo, which views Anna May’s silken, waterfall hair, as a distinct character, is by artist Man Ray, real name Emmanuel Radnitzky.
A spy for the Mossad has informed Seraphic Secret that the famously anonymous Bookworm looks exactly like Tueday Weld in “Sex Kittens Go to College.”
The other day, a friend from shul told me that he feels like giving up.
“Reading your blog post about the countless gender choices on Facebook,” said my friend, “made me realize that my grandchildren won’t be shocked at this craziness. To them, it will be normal. And that is sick. It feels like the radical left have won the culture wars and now we’re just fighting over meaningless scraps.”
“We can’t just give up,” I said.
But his despair left a profound impression on me.
Is it true that the radical left have already won? Does the rise of a Marxist community agitator to POTUS mean the end of the American Republic?
And then I sat down and read The Bookworm Returns: Life in Obama’s America, an eBook which should be mandatory reading for every American.
The goal of the postmodern Democrat party is to centralize and harness the power of the state, which is then used as a blunt instrument of intimidation to suppress liberty and bring about an imagined Socialist utopia.
Because Socialism always brings poverty, unemployment, misery and chaos wherever it rears its collective head, Democrats have re-branded Socialism with the feel-good label of Social Justice.
There is no such thing.
In today’s WSJ editorial page, Stephen Blackwood details how ObamaCare made his mother’s excellent coverage illegal, even as she battles cancer.
When I read this story, I was gripped by rage and sadness. Our son, Ariel Chaim ZT’L, battled cancer for eight long years. Our insurance coverage was excellent. Only once did the insurance company balk at paying for a treatment. We hired a lawyer. He wrote one letter. The insurance company reversed their decision.
Ariel passed away. But the expensive medical treatments he received, the fine and caring physicians and nurses, and his will to live, prolonged Ariel’s precious life far longer than was originally predicted.
Try writing a letter to the U.S. government.
ObamaCare is not working and cannot work. That is obvious. What will the Democrats do to contain the damage? Simple. They will declare ObamaCare a success. And then they will propose a single-payer system—AKA Socialism—in order to make ObamaCare even better.
When there are not enough doctors to treat patients the Democrats will temporarily but forever, suspend immigration laws in order to induce Voodoo healers from Haiti to take up the slack.
If you object you are a racist.
When the money runs out for ObamaCare, as it must because it’s a Ponzi scheme, the Democrats will raise taxes again and again and again.
If you object you are a charter member of the despised one-percent — and a racist.
If you die because of ObamaCare, you can take comfort in the knowledge that you are dying in order to smooth out income inequality, and for the greater good of the Democrat party.
And by dying in a timely fashion you get to prove that you are not a racist.
This might be my favorite photo of Brigitte Bardot. I’m pretty sure it’s a still from Contempt directed by the tedious and talentless Marxist Jean Luc Godard. Either BB is wondering how she got roped into a dopey art film, or she’s having a migraine.
This week Seraphic Secret has been preoccupied with, um, stuff. Hence, no time to post about the latest ObamaCare outrage, our government of the pen and by the phone, and of course, John Kerry’s startling and touching discovery of his Jewish ancestry.
Anyhoo.
It is Friday. Time to take a vacation from the weight of history.
Painting of blood libel in Sandomierz Cathedral
The Jew-hating agenda of Presbyterian Church USA is cloaked in liberal/progressive/leftist/Democrat sloganeering — in other words, Orwellian Newspeak. The PCUSA utilizes the fashionable squawk of social justice, but mixes it with the blood-soaked theology of supersessionism.
The church’s published work, “Zionism Unsettled,” is a poisonous document that argues for delegitimizing Israel. The subtext of this study guide — a media presentation with all the intellectual posturing and iniquity of the Nuremberg Laws — is an attack on Judaism and Torah whose underpinning is the medieval blood libel.
Make no mistake about it: PCUSA has adopted Jew-hatred as official social and theological doctrine.
The following article was written by my two close friends, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein.
Presbyterian churches are teaching that their Jewish neighbors are inherently racist and prone to abusing the rights of others.
That’s the key message of PCUSA’s new congregational study guide, “Zionism Unsettled.” Released by its Israel-Palestine Mission Network, the guide “explores the theological and ethical exceptionalism of Jewish and Christian Zionism, which have been sheltered from open debate despite the intolerable human rights abuses rooted in their core beliefs.”
To be clear, this is no mere attack on Israeli policies, but rather on the very legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise.
PCUSA has theologically resurrected the UN’s infamous 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution (later rescinded). It puts all on notice that lovers of Zion — Jews and Christians alike — are bigots.
To be clear, this is no mere attack on Israeli policies, but rather on the very legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise.
PCUSA’s depiction of Zionism as a sin fills a niche in the global political campaign casting Israel as an illegitimate colonial/historic mistake. It also means that a major (albeit ageing and shrinking) mainline Protestant denomination declares the majority of Jews to be a bunch of morally decadent untermenschen, worthy of condemnation and disparagement. Will the faithful now be taught that Jews are people like us, just a little less so?
Gloria Grahame exercises her Second Amendment rights.
Democrats insist that murdering children in the womb is legal and moral because it’s a matter of privacy.
And yet Democrats also insist that it’s my responsibility to pay for this mass murder — mostly of black babies, which constitutes not just a war on babies, but a race war.
So: abortion is private, but not really.
Democrats inform us that this inverted logic is in the Constitution.
I can’t find it. Anywhere.
Anna May Wong in a studio publicity still from the 1930s.
If you want to torture yourself, take a look at your passport.
Chances are you look pretty awful. With flat lighting, a grim full frontal pose, and that look of bafflement, your photo probably looks like a mug shot.
Are glamorous Hollywood stars just like us when they submit to the artless lens of the passport photographer?
You be the judge.
Shirley Temple arriving at the premiere of her film “Wee Willie Winkie” in Hollywood, 1937. Photo by AFP
Shirley Temple Black passed away yesterday. She was 85. At the height of her career in the 1930s, she was the most popular actress in Hollywood with more drawing power than Clark Gable and Greta Garbo combined.
As a child star during the Depression, the little girl with the 56 perfect corkscrew curls projected determination and optimism to a dispirited nation. In many of her movies, she was a feisty orphan who taught men how to be better men. When her career ended, she was but 22 years old. As for the millions she earned, her father squandered everything. Rather than retreat, like so many stars, into a shell of bitter nostalgia, Shirley Temple moved ahead and forged a new life for herself and her family. She was a great actress and American, a prominent conservative Republican, and a thoroughly decent woman.
Believe it or not, the White House actually released this photo of Bo and Sunny Obama, all decked out in diamond necklaces. This public display of vulgar decadence is revolting when you consider that 20% of Americans are on food stamps.
France.
To some, the very word conjures images of romance: Maurice Chevalier, the Eiffel Tower, damp cobblestones under pale moonlight, elegant women sipping wine, and goofy black berets.
Me, I think of Vichy France. I think of the gendarmes enthusiastically rounding up French Jews, herding them into cattle cars, and shipping them to the crematoria of Auschwitz. All accomplished without the aid of a single German soldier. Even the SS were shocked at how efficiently and ruthlessly the French collaborated in the genocide of the Jewish people.
Conservatives believe that Democrats are delusional utopians.
Democrats believe that conservatives are evil.
My wife, Karen, and I were raised as lever-pulling New York Democrats. Why were we Democrats for so many years? Well, because our parents were Democrats. Why were our parents Democrats? Because, they told us, Democrats were for the little guy and Republicans were for the wealthy.
Believe it or not, that was the whole ideology.
Dumb. I know. But there you are.
Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, and Mary Badham as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962.
We continue our survey of the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1960s.
For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1950s, click here.
For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1940s, click here.
For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1930s click here.
For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1920s click here.
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962
From the brilliant opening credits, designed by Stephen Frankfurt, accompanied by Elmer Bernstein’s heartfelt score, this lovely film evokes the innocence and terrors of childhood.
The new book
by Robert J. Avrech
Available in All Major Book Stores
Adobe Digital Edition's version is available through the Lulu store!
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
