Recently in Jewish life Category

Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust. But while millions worldwide observed Yom HaShoah Monday, Librescu sacrificed his life for his Virginia Tech students. From the Jerusalem Post, via my favorite blog:

Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter when the man attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, "but all the students lived - because of him," Virginia Tech student Asael Arad - also an Israeli - told Army Radio.

Several of Librescu's other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said Librescu's son, Joe.

"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

"If you ever forget you are a Jew, a Gentile will remind you."

So the saying goes. And for me, it was true: I grew up in a Christian home and, aside from my last name, knew nothing about what it was to be Jewish. Except of course, for the jokes, which usually involved terms like "money grubbing."

It seems today that presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson wasn't aware of the stereotype that says Jews are stingy money hoarders, a slander that has been used to incite violence and foment malevolence. Here is what he told a group of Jewish activists, courtesy of Haaretz:

"I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."

Thompson later apologized for the comments that had caused a stir in the audience, saying that he had meant it as a compliment, and had only wanted to highlight the "accomplishments" of the Jewish religion.

"I just want to clarify something because I didn't [by] any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things," he said.

It's difficult to imagine someone being so oblivious, but he is running for president. That should be worth something. The headline from the Dallas Morning News' religion blog says it all: "Next he'll tell the NAACP that he loves that great fried chicken and watermelon they serve..."

Sammy Davis Jr. and Rod Carew were Jews. Jordan Farmar can thank his mother and Lenny Kravitz his father. For Whoopi Goldberg, the Jewish blood is a little farther back on the genealogical tree. But other than this list of recognizable black Jews, many of whom are converts to Judaism, African-American Jews are largely an "invisible" group, says Lewis Ricardo Gordon, director of Temple University's Center for Afro-Jewish Studies.

Gordon, according to this article from the Philly Inquiror, is trying to change that by researching the roots of black Jews (not to be confused with Beta Israel, the ancient Jews of Ethiopa).

"Most American Jews identify as descended from ancient Jews," without acknowledging that the ancients were dark-skinned, Gordon says.

Judaism's biblical fathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and mothers (Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca and Leah) lived at a time and place when most everybody was brown-skinned, Gordon says.

"Moses was probably a dark-skinned man, too," he says. "He probably did not look like Charleton Heston."

Time, trade routes and politics each had a role in creating the "wandering Jew," says Gordon, who previously chaired the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. "But Jews have always been an amalgam."

That was the question I asked just now when I saw this post on LA Observed:

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine's office helpfully sends along the news that the boss just finished the Boston Marathon. His time was 3:10:03, good for a pace of 7:15 per mile. Levine represents the Valley.

What struck me about this is that on Saturday, I wrote this story for the Daily News, which focused on a Yom HaShoah commemoration in Sacramento today. The observence, for which Holocaust survivors from each Assembly district were invited to share their stories of survival, was organized by Levine's office. Levine is Jewish and, according to the itinerary, was to host a reception with Assemblyman Ira Ruskin after a ceremony on the Assembly floor.

"The Holocaust was a terrible tragedy that occurred 60-plus years ago. But when you look around the world today, you still see tragedies of the same proportion," I quoted Levine saying. "Kosovo and Darfur and Rwanda. The list goes on. We are not learning, and we need to learn from the past and stop these things before they rise to the level of the Holocaust."

So what was he doing in Boston?

"He qualified for that in December -- at that point we were already months into the planning," his press secretary, Alex Traverso, told me. "Only a couple weeks ago he decided that he was going to (go)."

Sam Zell got the treatment today from the largest Jewish newspapers in Los Angeles and New York. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and The Forward recycle the stories of Zell's reputation as a open-shirt-wearing, motorcycle-riding, grave-dancing business maverick.

But, more fascinating, is that both papers note the oddity of Zell, whose parents fled Poland the night before Nazi invasion, placing the winning bid for the Tribune Co, which owns the Los Angeles Times.

From The Forward:

The irony of Zell’s latest success is that it will likely make him the owner of a company that has been the very antithesis of the Jewish summer camp culture in which Zell was molded. The Chicago Tribune, the company’s flagship publication, has had a famously antagonistic relationship with the Jewish community in Chicago — historically because of its right-wing, isolationist stance during World War II, and more recently because of its critical coverage of Israel. Newspaper watchers say that Zell and the Tribune will be an interesting mix.

“The paper has a reputation for having a thick glass ceiling for Jews,” said Michael Siegel, who for 25 years has been the rabbi at Chicago’s Anshe Emet Synagogue, where Zell is a member. “For someone like Sam Zell, who is noted as a grave dancer, here is he is more of a grave spinner. There are probably some past owners and executives who are spinning in their graves right now.”

And from The Jewish Journal:

Happily for them, most of the old-time Los Angeles anti-Semites who used to hang out at the downtown California Club are either dead or too old to care that a Jew is on the verge of owning the L.A. Times.

Not just any Jew. Sam Zell looks as though he's one tough Jew, probably even tougher than the old California Clubbers who stole the water from the Owens Valley and got rich in sneaky San Fernando Valley land deals.

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Another Jew, David Geffen, is waiting in the wings, hoping to be either Zell's joint-venture partner or to buy the Times from him.

However it turns out, we'll probably have a Jew in charge of the Times, which was once one of old Los Angeles' most famous WASP institutions. What a great day for old L.A. Jews with long memories of country clubs and downtown clubs that banned them; restrictive covenants that kept them out of certain fancy neighborhoods; anti-Semitic fraternities and sororities at USC and UCLA and law firms that never seemed able to find a place for a smart Jewish attorney. They also may have memories of the old Times, which, while not anti-Semitic, was a perfect reflection of the conservative Republican WASP culture of Los Angeles' upper classes.

Why are Jews so smart? (Or dumb, depending on your point of reference.) Well, in this month's Commentary Magazine, controversial scholar Charles Murray, a self-described "Scots-Irish Gentile," has a piece titled "Jewish Genius" in which he writes that "going back to the time of Moses, Judaism was intertwined with intellectual complexity."

In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. You do the math.

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New York City’s public-school system used to administer a pencil-and-paper IQ test to its entire school population. In 1954, a psychologist used those test results to identify all 28 children in the New York public-school system with measured IQ’s of 170 or higher. Of those 28, 24 were Jews.

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Nothing that I have presented up to this point is scientifically controversial. The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data. And so we come to the great question: how and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?

Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, tries to answer that question here. He refutes research published last year in the Journal of Biosocial Science that reported Ashkenazi Jews had heightened intelligence, but not Sephardic or Oriental Jews. Gregory Cochran, an author of that study, snaps back in The Forward.

“I would call it pure speculation,” said Cochran, who is a researcher in Utah. “I don’t think there’s any evidence he’s right.”

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Murray acknowledges that his work is based more on historical impressions than on rigorous science, but it is already provoking debate in a corner of the intellectual world that tends to make Jews very uncomfortable: genetics.

Cochran’s work was widely panned by geneticists, and Murray makes even less of an effort to placate these experts with scientifically grounded evidence. The assumption from which both researchers work — that intelligence has a genetic basis — is still disputed by many scientists. Harry Ostrer, a leading Jewish geneticist, said that Murray’s work was “speculation” and that both Murray and Cochran trade in a “love of group typology — Jews are smart and blacks are great athletes.”

I was going to mention here tomorrow that the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a rare ceremony planned to commemorate Yom Hashoah on Monday, but The Jewish Journal beat me with a cover story that hits newstands in the morning.

The Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi hunter, will posthumously honor Khaled Abdelwahab, a Tunisian man who saved the lives of Jews under German occupation in 1942. His daughter will accept the award on his behalf, and the daughter of one of the men he helped, Jacob Boukris, lives in Southern California and will be there.

Abdelwahab is the first Arab to be nominated by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, as "Righteous Among the Nations." Here's a portion of the Journal's article:

The Nazi takeover immediately affected Jacob Boukris (wedding photo, right), an affluent household appliances manufacturer, as well as his wife, Odette, and their 11-year-old daughter, Anny. German troops gave the family one hour to evacuate their spacious house in the coastal town of Mahdia, then the soldiers turned it into a barrack and took all the valuables. The family and two dozen Jews found shelter in a nearby olive oil factory, but a few days later, another visitor appeared at midnight.

He was Khaled Abdelwahab (the transliterated Arab name is also spelled Abdelwahhab), a notably handsome man of 32, whose father was Tunisia's most eminent historian. The visitor told the startled Jews that they must leave immediately and explained why. Young Abdelwahab served as liaison between the local population and the Nazi occupiers. He used the position to ingratiate himself with the Germans and, like Oskar Schindler in Poland, frequently treated the officers to meals and endless rounds of wine.

The Germans had set up a brothel and impressed a number of local women, among them Jewish girls. One evening, a drunken officer confided that he had his eye on a particularly beautiful Jewish woman and planned to take her to the brothel and rape her the next night. The intended victim, Abdelwahab quickly realized, was Odette Boukris.