Sep 08
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, Holocaust, Jews, survivors
New York, Wednesday, November 16, 6:30 pm
On November 24, 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise held a press conference announcing State Department confirmation that the Jews of Europe were being mass murdered. How did American Jews and their leaders respond to the crisis? Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, an award-winning new documentary by Pierre Sauvage (56 min.), presents the challenging testimony of Peter Bergson, a Palestinian Jew who led a determined and controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Sauvage, historians Richard Breitman and Jonathan Karp, and other distinguished scholars, Sponsored by the Center for Jewish History, the American Jewish Historical Society and the Varian Fry Institute.
Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust—click here to view 4 min. excerpt from the documentary
Most Americans—even many American Jews—believe that we didn’t know. Many assume that we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson! A Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook, 1915-2001), had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand led what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenuous efforts from 1941 to 1945 underscore just how much was known—and how much could have been attempted during those difficult years. Sometimes vilified at the time, Bergson remains a controversial yet relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust.
The only documentary to draw on both existing filmed interviews with Peter Bergson, Not Idly By provides the riveting first-hand testimony of the charismatic and eloquent Bergson, who comments on the response to the crisis by non-European Jews and describes the Bergson Group’s determined efforts to fight the Holocaust. This notably included the fiery 1943 production We Will Never Die by Ben Hecht and Kurt Weill (Madison Square Garden, Hollywood Bowl), presented extensively for the first time in the documentary. Yes, this is a one-sided view of those times: Peter Bergson’s. Isn’t it about time we gave further though to that side?
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-294-8301
Ticket Sales $15 general, $10 CJH, AJHS members, seniors, students
Further information: Not Idly By – Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust
Timely?
Fresh Headlines From the Crypt: ‘Bomb Auschwitz,’ Says Golda; FDR: No Way, by J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Daily Forward, Sept. 5, 2011
Pierre Sauvage’s response to the attack on the Bergson Group that is at the heart of the article:
Yes, Roosevelt was good for the Jews—the Jews of America. And yes, bringing a reluctant country into the war was a major Roosevelt accomplishment. And yes, to be sure, American Jews then did not have the power and self-confidence we acquired later.
But let’s start by being candid about the American response—and the American Jewish response—to the massacre of the Jews of Europe: we here all have skin in the game. We are talking, after all, about what our families did and didn’t do during that long crisis. The widespread and persistent eagerness to assert that “we didn’t know” and “we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known” is one measure of how powerful the taboo continues to be about the unacknowledged American experience of the Holocaust. J. J. Goldberg’s trivializing of the Bergson Group’s amazing determination to get the word out and to do something about it strikes me as merely a new attempt to keep the taboos in place.
As Peter Bergson puts it my documentary Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, “We couldn’t have stopped the Holocaust, we could have slowed the Holocaust, we could have made it an inefficient Holocaust. The people who made it efficient were the Allies who didn’t interfere. And the people who didn’t urge them to interfere were the [American] Jews.”
The fact is that we will never never know what might have been accomplished to rescue Jews in Europe since so little was attempted or even considered. For my part, I was born and sheltered in a tiny Christian area of France that defied the Nazis and turned itself into the very haven of refuge that America refused to be. My own life has thus taught me that collective will and action can be startlingly imaginative and dynamic even under the most trying circumstances. Where there’s a will, there is indeed often a way.
What the article also completely misses is that at this point, the discussion should be as much about us as it is about them. So many years later, are we at last willing to probe not only what happened here then, but our many evasions today about that experience? If we do not fully and forthrightly—and without smugness—acknowledge and dissect our share in past failures, are we not limiting our ability to act effectively in meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow?
Belatedly Recognizing Heroes of the Holocaust, The New York Times, Sunday, Aug. 7 (on the Bergson Group)
Bergson Group Activists Recognized At Yad Vashem-Wyman Conference, The Jewish Press, July 27, 2011
Historians Debate: Could More Jews Have Been Saved?, Jerusalem Post, July 17, 2011, on the Bergson Group conference at Yad Vashem on July 15 (excerpts from Not Idly By were shown)
Pierre Sauvage also draws on Not Idly By and the work-in-progress And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille in his illustrated lectures Learning Hope From the Holocaust: The Challenge To Us Of Holocaust Rescuers, and Did We Fight the Holocaust? Varian Fry and Peter Bergson.
Upcoming: Syracuse University, NY; York College, PA; Memphis, TN; Denver, CO.
Jan 17
Jeanette Friedmandomestic violence, HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, judaism, local stories/community, people, politics, survivors
Lenore Skenazy asked recently about the “Jewishness” of NYC and why that’s so. She asked in a NY Magaziney kind of way, but I bit and wrote that it’s hard to say in a few words why NYC is the center of the Jewish universe. It’s not a NY Magazine poll. It’s a hefty question on lots of levels. I did some editing since I sent it, but here’s my response, for better or worse.
I was born in NYC, one of twins born to survivors in Bed Stuy. I grew up in the ultra-O Jewish world, my father was politically and religiously active, I went to Jewish schools and Brooklyn College, and some powerful people grew up with me. I learned early on how things worked in town–in the Jewish world and the “real world.” I am a writer and editor who covers the Jewish world and more. I used to work for Tiger Beat and RightOn! and write nightlife guides to the city–now one of the things I do is edit a newspaper for Holocaust survivors.
New York City is the international center of the Jews–regardless of what others want to believe. Religiously, culturally, politically, intellectually–from the insane Netura Karta, to JewBus and Ethical Culture, to the world of the Jewish mind, theatre, music, business, entertainment, and even in terms of Zionism. NYC is the central hub, where Jewish power resides. Not Israeli power. Jewish power, and there is a profound difference.
Israel cannot be a world Jewish center because it officially denies vibrant Jewish denominations, old and new, that deviate from their standards of Halachic Judaism, which grows more Talibanistic with each new edict they issue (ie. arresting women who pray in prayer shawls at the wall, refusing to grant a divorce to a woman whose husband has been sexually abusing their daughter because he hasn’t harmed HER). Israel is problematical Jewishly because the American Jews who go there haven’t been able to make it a more egalitarian and tolerant country…yet.
And some of them don’t even want to do that. Many settlers went to the West Bank from Brooklyn, Queens and Riverdale, Manhattan, and the West Bank of the Hudson (Manhattan’s best kept secret). They became activists, like Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the pioneer rabbi in Efrat on the West Bank (came from the West Side) –and even he comes back to NYC to recharge his batteries.
As for America outside the greater NYC metro area, yes, there are Jews in the center of the country and on the other coast doing interesting things, but this town is where the Jewish heart beats, where the money is raised, where the media is met, and the UN confronted, and where most of the American Friends of offices are located. We feed the beast, so to speak, with our money and our kids and our ideas. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But our ideas inspire and spread everywhere. And when ideas come from the outside, we absorb them and make them our own.
We’ve got the Conference of Presidents, the WZO, the Jewish Agency, the headquarters of Hadassah, National UJA in its latest incarnation, UJAFedNY (arguably the largest charity in the city) Jewish Outreach, if I’d look it up, EVERYTHING Jewish is either headquartered here or has a branch office here.
Can NY be more Jewish than that? Yes–because here the assimilated generation walks around town with some of the wildest T-shirts proudly proclaiming their jewishness with a small j. The social media center of the Jewish world is located in this city, so the techies that built jewishnetworld are hanging all over town. Even Matisyahu is here. Along with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, and a gospel singing Orthodox Jewish Black congregation in Harlem.
Most New York Jews have a New York City State of Mind–that translates into a brash ballsiness, an unwillingness to put up with crap and refusal to beat around the bush–and when there are conferences out of town, the NY Jews often have to contain their impatience with their slower paced sisters and brothers.
NYC is where every denomination of Judaism feeds its spirit, using the differences and similarities among them to spark up some amazing stuff, like Dayenu (Enough) the domestic violence initiative taken up by The New York Board of Rabbis, consisting of rabbis of every denomination and beyond, or the Auditory Oral School of New York, founded by a Hareidi couple in their home ten years ago, who teach profoundly deaf and language delayed kids from every walk of life–including Arabs, Chinese, Asians, Chassidim, African Americans, etc, etc, etc,–to hear and speak and get ready for regular schools.
It’s where the largest contingent of Holocaust survivors and their children live, and where Ben Meed, who founded the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, and his wife Vladka, set the tone for Holocaust commemorations around the globe that led to the empowerment of survivors all over the world, and where New Yorker Ernie Michel was able start realizing a dream he had in Auschwitz–to bring Holocaust survivors together in Israel. New York is where the first meeting for the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors took place. And Elie Wiesel is a New Yorker, too. He earned his stripes!
There’s something else the Holocaust survivors did in New York–they rebuilt neighborhoods in the images of their lives in Europe in Boro Park and Williamsburg, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Staten Island, Rego Park, Forest Hills–revitalizing synagogue life and Judaism of all sorts in this town. And if I try to name all the Jewish brainiacs (and not such smarties) in every conceivable field who have shaped this town and the world, I would never finish the list, and would be giving us an eyin hora (evil eye), (poo-poo-poo).
As for Jew food–it’s not about pastrami and killer kolesterol anymore! I’m waiting for someone to come up with Fro-Jew fusion any minute now!
Last bit–At Brooklyn College, in 1981, I took a course in Jewish ethics (hold the jokes). This question was asked on the final exam (you can check with the prof. He’s still at BC, his name is Sid Leiman):
According to the Talmud, do you have the right to deflect a massive nuclear bomb headed for NYC to Paducah, KY?
I said no, but I would deflect it anyway, and take my chances with God at the Pearly Gates because in addition to the numbers of people who lived here (compared to the numbers in Paducah) by allowing NYC and the surrounding area to be destroyed I would be destroying the center of the Jewish universe, and I am selfish enough not to want to do that.
And that is still true, and while I believe it’s one of the reasons NYC was targeted by the terrorists, our NYC attitude is ‘f’em!, we’re gonna do what we gotta do, and ain’t no one gonna stop us.
Jeanette Friedman
With apologies to the song
I’m that Jew York City girl
grew up ridin’ the subways, running with people
Up in Harlem, down on Broadway
I’m no tramp, but I’m no lady, talkin’ that street talk
the heart and soul of New York City
who should know the score by now
a native Jewish New Yorker, that’s me!
Sep 01
Jeanette Friedmansurvivors
Finance C’tee clashes on Holocaust survivor payments
Approval of the payments to Holocaust survivor meant approval of a budget cut.
Adrian Filut 1 Sep 08 18:12
There were heated exchanges in the Knesset Finance Committee today after MKs discovered that the approval of the warrants allowing payments to Holocaust survivors is conditional on the committee approving an across-the-board cut of 6% in ministerial budgets, passed by the government a month ago.
The government approved the 6% cut , which amounts to NIS 760 million, to finance the adding of an extra 1,000 officers to Israel Police, to finance part of the education reform, as well as to fund payments to Holocaust survivors. In other words, the money for survivors was supposed to be financed by the budget cut. Under Knesset regulations, the Knesset Finance Committee cannot decide on a budgetary allocation beyond the limits of the approved budget for 2008, without specifying where the financing will come from.
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