“This Sunday, January 27, UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France, and over 350 venues in 55 countries, will host an unprecedented screening of the award-winning documentary, “Who Will Write Our History” and concurrent Facebook Live events. The international screening events and Facebook Live, orchestrated by Abramorama, and with the support of UNESCO, the World Jewish Congress’ #WeRemember initiative and multiple major partner organizations, takes place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and comes at a time of rising anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic attacks, and increasing concerns that the lessons of the Holocaust are quickly being forgotten.”

I feel a personal connection to this film by Spielberg and Grossman due to my family’s horrific past in Europe where they died in the Nazi concentration camps. My father’s cousin meticulously researched what happened to our family. Many were killed in the camps. The most frightening was the family members who died in Auschwitz. We will never know if they were experimented on by the demonic Dr. Josef Mengele.
Watch the Trailer
Synopsis: This film is about a courageous group of resistance fighters imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. Now, for the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary.
The New York Times calls it, “A vital Holocaust documentary…Heartbreaking.”
Writter and director Roberta Grossman and executive producer Spielberg teamed up once again to create Who Will Write Our History which the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage, and stunning dramatizations that transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon—the truth—and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

Now playing at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan

Showtimes & Tickets

Wed January 23

• 11.05am
• 1.00pm
• 3.05pm
• 5.10pm
• 7.15pm
• 9.20pm

Thu January 24

• 11.05am
• 1.00pm
• 3.05pm
• 5.10pm
• 7.15pm
• 9.20pm

Fri January 25

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

Sat January 26

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

Sun January 27

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

Mon January 28

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

Tue January 29

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

Wed January 30

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

Thu January 31

• 11.00am
• 1.00pm
• 3.40pm
• 6.30pm

The post Spielberg Movie ‘Who Will Write Our History’ Gives the Facts vs #FakeNews appeared first on Award-Winning Writer and Graphic Designer.

How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate — whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama’s — come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician?

That’s the question Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Susan Bordo, Ph.D., asked and answered in her new book, “The Destruction of Hillary Clinton” (Melville House Publishing, April 2017). Bordo, a media critic, cultural historian and feminist scholar, presents myriad reasons for Clinton’s shocking defeat. The biggest culprits included sexism, the right’s attacks on her, Russian interference in the election, and “media madness.”

Bordo told the Forward in an exclusive interview, “We’re inundated every day with sound bites — fragments of supposed breaking news. Anyone on Twitter or Facebook, or watching CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, saw this endless repetition of clickbait headlines. Phrases became stamped into brains: ‘Momentum for Bernie Sanders: Hillary Clinton likely to be charged with email crime.’”

The author also referred to “two immensely powerful assaults” on Clinton’s candidacy. One was FBI Director James Comey’s “inappropriate, inaccurate, and inflammatory interference in the general election.” Bordo was, of course, referring to Comey’s letter, made public 11 days before the election, stating that the FBI was opening a new investigation into recently discovered emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop. By the time Comey issued his second letter to Congress, on November 6 stating that those emails did not change the FBI’s July decision that neither Clinton nor her team had committed any prosecutable offenses, it was too late.

The other huge offense, according to Bordo, happened much earlier, during the primaries. In February, we all saw Senator Bernie Sanders throw shade on Clinton, shouting to his growing millennial fan base that Clinton wasn’t a “true progressive.” He branded her “The Establishment.”

Bordo told me: At first, I’d identified with Sanders. He and I have virtually the same background. He grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Both working class Jewish families, left-leaning, secular. He sounded like one of my relatives—kind of fun, a bit exotic. I think for many young people across the country, he was like a character from a situation comedy.

His appeal to the younger generation of voters seemed to be a combination of his grandpa persona and his socialist-sounding ideals. Bordo writes that Sanders became a bigger problem in May when he referred to Clinton as “the lesser of two evils.”

“People who think if Bernie had gotten the nomination he would have been able to defeat Trump, just don’t get it,” Bordo said. “Anti-Semitism, with the power of the GOP to use that in ways to alienate people from Sanders, was just lying in wait. You even saw it creep up for Clinton although she isn’t Jewish.”

That reminded me of the sickening Trump tweet with an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by money, with its white lettering against a red Jewish star that read, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever.” Millions of Clinton supporters, like myself, have been left mourning what could have been while having to listen to the deafening blame heaped onto Hillary: that she ran a weak campaign.

Bordo said, “All campaigns make mistakes. It’s as though the critics were blind to the enormous character assassination that was happening to Clinton on a daily basis. On the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions gathered around the world to protest his policies. A newscaster asked, ‘Where was this energy before the election?’”

Clinton lost, Bordo said, “because of a slender but critical mass of voters” who decided late for Trump — after the second Comey announcement — or voted third party or didn’t vote at all. Most were “hardworking people with little time to research facts, and trusted the morning and evening news.” That segment included “white, middle-class, suburban women who’d seen Clinton caricatured as untrustworthy, a self-centered elitist who didn’t understand the problems of ordinary people,” as well as “rust-belt men who learned from fragmentary sound-bites that Clinton was a corporate shill who had proposed putting coalminers out of business—rather than an honest candidate describing an economic reality.”

For the many of us still shell-shocked by this unrecognizable America, Bordo’s book offers a clear analysis of how a candidate who received the overwhelming majority of the popular vote, did not win the presidency.

“Until Trump actually won,” said Bordo,

many young, straight, white women may have believed that the rights they had enjoyed all their lives were somehow secure. The election woke them up, and propelled them to become a part of the resistance that Blacks, immigrants, and LGBTQ citizens were already engaged in — because they always knew safety was an illusion. If that resistance remains as diverse and committed as those first post-inauguration protests it will change the landscape of American politics.

Perhaps change has come already — since election day, according to Emily’s List, close to 13,000 Democratic women are ready to run for office and 7,000 have signed up to help them win.

Click here for more articles on the Forward.

The post Interview about The Destruction of Hillary Clinton by Susan Bordo for the Forward appeared first on Award-Winning Writer and Graphic Designer.

Trying to get an unbiased education about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a never-ending conundrum. It’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant — one blind man grabs the tail and says, “An elephant is like a rope,” another feels the trunk and says, “An elephant is like a snake.” Depending on where you go for information, you may get the tail or the trunk, but never the whole elephant.

On the evening of February 25, Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y hosted a screening of Jerusalem U’s documentary, “Crossing the Line 2: The New Face of Anti-Semitism on Campus.” After the movie there was a panel discussion featuring Eric Fingerhut, President and CEO of Hillel International, and three student activists, Justin Hayet from Binghamton University, Chloe Valdary from the University of New Orleans and Daniel Mael from Brandeis University. The moderator was Andy Borans, executive director of AEPi International.

For those who don’t know, Jerusalem U is a far-right, pro-Israel online organization. Don’t be fooled by the name: they aren’t a real university. But if you Google “Jerusalem University,” you get to their website.

I asked Jerusalem U founder and CEO Rabbi Raphael Shore to explain the U in the organization’s name. “Have you ever looked at iTunes U? Hello?” he said. “It’s a very common thing these days. If we had said ‘University’ people would say, ‘Wait, what’s going on?’ but when we say ‘Jerusalem U’ it indicates we are an Internet place of learning.”

When I asked if Jerusalem U offers a balanced education on Israel, Shore said, “We don’t feel we have to have 50% of Palestinian voices, just as the Palestinians don’t present 50% of Israeli voices.” When I asked if he felt that Jerusalem U offers a non-biased view of Israel, he said, “There is no such thing as a non-biased view on anything. That’s life.” When asked if educators about Israel should give equal time to Palestinian voices, he contradicted his earlier statement by saying, “We give 50% to Palestinian voices. That’s balanced.”

The film is a powerful depiction of deeply disturbing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic events on campuses, including shouting matches and swastikas. The shocking scenes in the film may inspire sympathy or fear and a motivation to fight for Israel — all of which are valuable aims — but I felt I only got the elephant’s tail. Where was the rest of the elephant, i.e., the opposing views?

I asked Jerusalem Post managing editor David Brinn if he found it odd that Hillel’s Fingerhut would align with this type of one-sided program. “I don’t find it jarring or strange that Fingerhut is appearing on a panel about anti-Semitism on college campuses,” he said. “Regardless of the political orientation of Jerusalem U, it’s a fact that anti-Jewish bias disguised as anti-Israel demonstrations and actions is on the rise on campuses, and it’s an issue that obviously affects Fingerhut and Hillel. So it makes perfect sense for him to appear on a panel that discusses the Jerusalem U film.”

“I would be delighted if Jerusalem U was exaggerating in order to gain advocates for Israel, but I fear that their films and projects point to real problems facing Israel and the Jewish world,” Brinn added. “I commend Fingerhut for including Jerusalem U under the same tent that he sits in with J Street.”

J Street U director Sarah Turbow, who also attended the screening, had a different view. “There are many organizations in the pro-Israel sphere that talk about themselves as apolitical. But I don’t believe that there is a way to educate about Israel without being political. It would have been very interesting to hear from pro-Palestinian perspectives in the film. My impression is that the film wanted to show one particular side. If that was their goal, they achieved it.”

Good to know I’m not the only one seeking more than one of the elephant’s appendages.

Hillel Spokesperson Arielle Poleg told me there was no conflict for Fingerhut. “Being pro-Israel is in Hillel’s DNA,” she said. “There is no contradiction between Hillel’s educational mission and its Israel advocacy. Under Eric’s leadership, Hillel has been pleased to partner with individuals and organizations representing a broad swath of opinion.”

This seemed like the tail but with a piece of the trunk.

Matti Friedman, a Jerusalem-based journalist and author who wrote a compelling article for the Atlantic titled, “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel,” said, “The resurgence of anti-Semitism is very real but much of the hysteria coming from the Jewish community is not helpful. What we need is not more advocacy but more intelligent journalism by knowledgeable people without an ideological ax to grind.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Additional articles on The Forward

The post What’s Eric Fingerhut Doing at a Jerusalem U Event? appeared first on Award-Winning Writer and Graphic Designer.