Is Schindler a Projection of Spielberg Himself?

‘Schindler’s List’ is a story of redemption—for both the film’s protagonist and its director

By Gabriel Sanders for Tablet Magazine

In a 1994 New Yorker profile that appeared a few months after the release of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg spoke candidly about how his Holocaust epic had transformed him.

In the past, he told the magazine’s Stephen Schiff, there had been projects he’d done for the money—things like the Indiana Jones sequels and Jurassic Park. “But,” he added, “these days I’d rather make the more difficult choices. I was just so challenged by Schindler’s List and so fulfilled by it and so disturbed by it. It so shook up my life, in a good way, that I think I got a little taste of what a lot of other directors have existed on all through their careers.”

Schindler’s List is also a story of transformation—of a hunger for money giving way to a higher calling. At its outset, Oskar Schindler is a dissolute, if charismatic, figure: a womanizer, a war profiteer, an opportunist. It’s more than an hour into the film before the girl in the red coat prompts his course-altering epiphany, and then another hour before the compilation of the list that secures his place in history.

Spielberg has often used characters who serve as stand-ins for himself: Roy Neary, the everyman visionary of Close Encounters; Upham, the brainy cartographer of Saving Private Ryan. Schindler fits squarely into this tradition. He’s a showman, a stager of spectacles, a Mitteleuropean P.T. Barnum. His talents, he tells Ben Kingsley’s Itzhak Stern, lie not so much with work but with “the presentation.” It’s perhaps no coincidence that the name by which Schindler goes most frequently is “Herr Direktor.”

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Word of the Day / Hamas: The terror movement that didn't do its Hebrew homework

It's quite the coincidence that 'Hamas' the terror group is spelled differently from 'hamas' the nasty act, but both originate from an Aramaic word for 'hard'

By Shoshana Kordova for Haaretz

It’s pretty safe to assume that the Islamic terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip didn’t conduct market research on the meaning and resonance of the organization’s name in Hebrew before choosing to call itself Hamas.

The Arabic name of the group is widely described as an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”) as well as an Arabic word meaning “zeal.” But unlike "Islamic Jihad," say, or "Al-Qaida," the name “Hamas” is not just an Arabic term or an English translation of one. It also happens to be a Hebrew word meaning “violence,” among other things.

Hamas – or rather, the lowercased hamas – has been around since antediluvian times. In fact, it was one of the reasons God flooded the earth, according to Genesis: “And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence [hamas]” (6:11).

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Tayyip Erdogan Vows To Protect Turkish Jews

Premier Says Israel Harms Jewry With 'Fraudulent Policies'

By JTA

Turkey will keep its Jewish citizens safe, but the Jewish community should denounce Israel, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a Turkish newspaper.

“Jews in Turkey are our citizens. We are responsible for their security of life and property,” Erdogan told the Daily Sabah.

He added: “I talked with our Jewish citizens’ leaders on Thursday and I stated that they should adopt a firm stance and release a statement against the Israeli government. I will contact them [Jewish leaders in Turkey] again, but whether or not they release a statement, we will never let Jewish people in Turkey get hurt.”

He said, according to the newspaper, that the Jewish leaders in Turkey should criticize “Israeli aggression,” and that the Israeli government “abuses all Jewish people around the world for its fraudulent policies.”

Erdogan on Friday criticized the United Nations for being “silent” on Israel’s operation in Gaza and said that Turkey has had difficulty delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza because of Israeli restrictions.

In an interview with CNN, Erdogan said that “If Israel is sincere on establishing a cease-fire, we will convince Hamas [to do the same].”

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What’s Wrong with Fiddler on the Roof

Fifty years on, no work by or about Jews has won American hearts so thoroughly. So what's my problem?

By Ruth R. Wisse in Mosaic Magazine

No creative work by or about Jews has ever won the hearts and imaginations of Americans so thoroughly as the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which this year is celebrating its 50th anniversary and next year will have its fifth Broadway revival.

Everyone enjoys this show, whose musical numbers—“Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “To Life,” “Matchmaker,” and others—not only enliven Jewish weddings but are commonly understood to represent something essential about Jews and Jewishness. Jeremy Dauber opens his new biography of Sholem Aleichem with Fiddler because Fiddler is how the beloved Yiddish author is known—if he is known at all—to English readers. “Forget Sholem Aleichem,” writes Dauber, “there’s no talking about Yiddish, his language of art, without talking about Fiddler on the Roof. There’s no talking about Jews without talking about Fiddler.” And Dauber ends the book by tracing the stages through which Sholem Aleichem’s stories of Tevye the Dairyman and his daughters were transformed by successive translators and directors into what, by the time the movie version of Fiddler was released in 1971, the New Yorker’s normally severe critic Pauline Kael would call “the most powerful movie musical ever made.”

Soon after the stage production opened in 1964 (music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein, with Zero Mostel in the title role), I was urged to see it by my teacher, the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who had just completed his History of the Yiddish Language. Unlike some purist defenders of Yiddish culture who were expressing mixed feelings about a classic work being hijacked for the American stage—and in contrast to several highbrow Jewish intellectuals, offended by what Irving Howe blisteringly called the play’s “softened and sweetened” nostalgia—Weinreich was delighted that Sholem Aleichem’s masterwork would be accessible to audiences who could never have come to know it in the original. He even defended as legitimate some of the changes that had been introduced in order to appeal to an American audience. I, too, loved the show, not least because Yiddish literature had become my subject of study, and I appreciated the boost.

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Town In Spain Changing Name, Building Jewish Studies Center To Remember Sephardic Background

From KosherPress.com

Castrillo Matajudíos, Spain – A Spanish town is in the process of changing its name due to the anti-Semitic translation, in addition to focusing on Jewish studies to remember the town’s history.

Castrillo Matajudíos contains words meaning, “kill Jews.” Reported on VIN news earlier this year, the town has voted to change the name to Castrillo Mota Judias, which means “Camp Jews Hill,” and to also open a Jewish studies center to bring light to the Sephardic history of the town reports Radio Arlanzón (http://bit.ly/1wspWU9).

Mayor Lorenzo Rodriguez met with the representative of the Board and President of the County Council to also discuss beginning archaeological digs to educate others on the history of the town and how it got its name.

The president of the Provincial Corporation, Cesar Rico, said that the idea sounds good and that the project will be interesting in both the recovery of priceless artifacts and learning about Sephardic culture.

The mayor stated that the Jewish studies center would focus on the significance of the Jewish community in that area during the time when they were expelled from Spain by Catholic Monarchs.

All of the projects could also lead to economic improvement for the town the mayor explained to the council.

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The Nazi Doctor Who Got Away With Mass Murder, Fled to Cairo, and Became a Muslim

‘The Eternal Nazi’ tells the gripping story of the hunt for Aribert Heim, and the German detective who relentlessly pursued him

By David Mikics for Tablet Magazine

“Everything would have been different if I had come from a happy home with people who cared about me,” Josef Mengele wrote in the 500-page autobiography discovered after his death. Mengele’s autobiography offers a disturbing spectacle: the pathetic whining of a pampered, sadistic murderer, interlaced with sermons on racial superiority and odd little drawings of bunnies and wooden cabinets. Mengele is a prime case of the perpetrator’s urge to see himself as a sufferer, a common syndrome among war criminals. In Auschwitz he was a petty god dispensing death; after the war, he became a weakling.

When Mengele drowned in 1979 while swimming off the coast of Brazil he became the most famous Nazi to escape judgment for his crimes. But there was another Nazi fugitive who lasted much longer: Aribert Heim, who like Mengele was both a doctor and a genocidal killer. Tall, athletic, and good-looking, Heim served in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen in 1942 and 1943, where inmates called him “Dr. Death.” After the war, he played for a time on a German hockey team in Bad Nauheim, then became a successful gynecologist in Baden-Baden, and finally escaped to Egypt, where, after living in solitude for years and then converting to Islam, he died in 1992. Most of the Third Reich’s evildoers lived undisturbed, comfortable lives in postwar Germany. Heim too might have escaped the net of justice had he not drawn attention to himself by fleeing from the Bundesrepublik, whose citizens were all too eager to gloss over his crimes.

Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet tell Heim’s story in The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim, and it’s a horrifying one. Heim apparently enjoyed injecting gasoline directly into the hearts of inmates, especially Jews. Sometimes he would cut off the head of a corpse and, after baking the flesh off, give the skull to a friend or display it as a trophy. He once told a 12-year-old Jewish boy, before giving him a fatal injection, that his death was merited because the Jews had started the war.

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How Magic Can Help Underprivileged Israeli Teenagers Get Ahead

When is a trick more than a trick? When Ophir Samson uses it to teach confidence, leadership, and work-related skills

By Iris Mansour for Tablet Magazine

Ophir Samson was sitting with a friend last year at one of his favorite restaurants in Jaffa when a young waiter approached the table, reached behind Samson’s ear, and pulled out a gold coin. After a brief moment of confusion, Samson smiled as he managed to place him: Over eight weeks in early 2012, Samson had taught magic tricks to a group of 15 teenagers at Jaffa’s Arab-Jewish Community Center. More than a year had passed, but this former student clearly remembered what he’d been taught.

The kids at the Community Center, Samson said, were typical teenagers: hard to control but energetic and engaging. They’d call their British-born teacher “Harry Potter” but would quiet down at the chance to learn a trick and the subtle steps and technical skills—practiced for hours, yet unnoticed by an audience—that turn a rusty amateur into a confident magician. To perfect the coin trick, for instance, your fingers have to move faster than the audience’s eyes, and you have to be able to direct someone else’s gaze where you want it to go.

Through the Smadar School for Young Magicians, Samson has taught dozens of Jewish and Arab Israelis, as well as refugees and children of undocumented parents living in Israel, to pull coins out of ears, make handkerchiefs disappear, and levitate banknotes. Held at places like Save a Child’s Heart, which provides life-saving medical procedures to children from the developing world, or Bialik-Rogozin, a school for children of asylum seekers and undocumented workers, Samson’s classes are meant to get teenagers fired up about magic, as well as build their confidence, develop their leadership skills, and get them used to speaking in public. “The purpose is to show them these skills are transferable in other areas,” said Samson. “Magic has done a huge service to me and developing my career.”

This summer, funded by a $1,000 grant from the Schusterman Foundation, Samson and four volunteers will be teaching four-week magic programs to more children at Bialik-Ragozin, a WIZO foster home, and kids living with their mothers at a shelter for battered women in Herziliya. Samson said: “I’m really excited about reaching new communities.”

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